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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This article actually gets the law right, as it stands today. I'm not sure if it's super relevant information, but it's correct. The 5th amendment says: "No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..." Witness is a legal term of art, which refers to someone who gives oral testimony recounting their own experiences. Handing over a key or touching a button is not testamentary and therefore not protected.

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No surprise. The author, Marcia Hoffman, used to be a Staff Attorney at the EFF and litigated some of their most important civil liberties cases.

Not quite.

> When a person has a valid privilege against self-incrimination, nobody — not even a judge — can force the witness to give that information to the government.

The Fifth Amendment explicitly outlines that you cannot successfully "plead the fifth" in response to a grand jury compelling you to testify.

No it does not, and the right against self-incrimination also holds when you are called for testimony under grand jury. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Hubbell.

Perhaps you are confusing the first and the second clause of fifth amendment?

Actually they got the law exactly wrong. "If the police demand that you give them the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence" you don't have to turn the key over without a warrant. The police have to have good knowledge that the incriminating evidence in the lockbox. And passwords are just a key. This has already gone through the courts, the courts can impel you to turn over your password, if they have evidence to suggest your computer has incriminating evidence. This won't be any different, they can't take your fingerprint or dna without probable cause. I don't see how it is any different.

When the 5th amendment applies, it protects you even when the police have a warrant. Courts have not reached agreement about whether turning over a password is like turning over a key or scanning your thumbprint. See: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130425/08171522834/judge-...

Probably cause isn't hard to manufacture, though. I believe there was a court decision recently that said that a state's drug sniffing dogs still provided valid probably cause even though they would bark whenever their owner wanted them to bark.

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