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Comment by nhayden | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, yes. In the US, yes, if they can show evidence that you should know the key.

I knew the key, but now I forgot. What now? Put me in jail for a faulty memory?

Yes. Contempt of court.

I knew the key and would readily input the key frequently in the past so that I could access my information, but now that you want that information I have conveniently forgotten the key.

Yes, they would put you in jail, but more for being a bad liar than for having a faulty memory.

What if you used it before, but not like yesterday? What if you last used it a month ago? A week ago? What is "frequently", once a day? Once every two days? Once a week?

It works for so many Presidents and Congressmen though!

Honestly, if I have a 32 character master-password on a strip of paper in my wallet and I just happen to lose my wallet before I get raided, then I'm pretty sure that I could show that I simply don't know the key.

The hard part would be to prove that you "just happened" to lose your wallet before you got raided, rather than disposed of it in expectation of the raid. Or that the whole story of that being where the key was is true, in the first place.

Isn't the burden of proof on the police to prove that you are lying? So if neither side has proof it must be assumed that you did indeed just happen to lose it.

It's also on you to tell that story convincingly.

Because realistically would you write down the pass key in only one place? That's all of your data after all. Your livelihood if you're a developer etc. You may get asked what sort of things losing that password has cost you, if you're the sort of person who has that level of security that probably means you're locked out of all sorts of other systems (thanks to now not having access to private keys) so they can be subpoenaed to see if you've managed to log into your hosting account recently despite not having the private key to do so. And if you magically have preserved your private keys elsewhere why should you be believed that your passkey solely exists on a piece of paper in your wallet...

What about your friends, co-workers etc who might be compelled to testify as to having seen you work on your computer and have never seen you get your wallet out at any point.

And as soon as that isn't believed all other testimony you may give is tainted because you've just lied to the court. Good luck with any mitigation in the event of a guilty plea as well because you've demonstrated you haven't acted in good faith.

Yes, but "proof" in the legal sense isn't mathematical/logical proof; even the criminal "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard does not involve elimination of all doubt: a fairly typical jury instruction [0] on the standard says of reasonable doubt that "[i]t is such a doubt as, in serious affairs that concern you, you would heed; that is, such a doubt as would cause reasonable men and women to hesitate to act upon it in matters of importance."

[0] https://www.jud.ct.gov/JI/Criminal/part2/2.2-3.htm

I think part of the problem with these discussions is that there are countless cases where the police won't stop just because there's a law that says so and so.

They often work hard to find workarounds or ways to charge you with other things to punish you anyway. The most obvious example is being innocent until proven guilty, and yet there are a lot of cases where the police shot someone to death because they raided the wrong home for example (which is why the tool is called SWATd I believe)

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