This is month-old news, but it’s pretty important/interesting to those of us who are either nerds who fear the government and/or pedophiles. According to this news.com article (via boingboing)

“U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors.”

Now I don’t know why any of the law-abiding readers of The District would be keeping data that could land them in the clink, but let’s suppose for a moment that you keep accurate account of money you’ve embezzled from the publication your employer. If the only record of this activity was stored in an Excel file that you stored as a trophy on your computer’s desktop, and you were to keep that file encrypted, then there’d be no way for you to get caught! You’d get off SCOT-FREE!

Not that you’d do anything like that, but it’s nice to know that there are still small parts of our digital lives that can be considered private. Now if only there were some way to use public-key cryptography on that other stash of incriminating evidence in the old prescription bottle in your sock drawer.

Tags: child porn, encryption, fifth amendment, law, pedofile, PGP, self-incrimination, technology