throw away the key

From: Modern Mechanix

“Federal prosecutors want a judge to order a Colorado woman to provide the password to decrypt her laptop, which the government seized with a search warrant.
     With backup from digital rights groups, the woman is fighting the feds, arguing that being forced to provide her password violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against forced self-incrimination.
    Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn is expected to rule any day on whether to force defendant Ramona Fricosu to decrypt her Toshiba Satellite M305, which authorities seized from her in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating financial fraud.
    The case is being closely watched by digital rights groups, as the issue has never been squarely weighed in on by federal courts, and the Supreme Court has never addressed the issue. [...]
    The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Marcia Hofmann said  in a court filing that the very act of requiring Fricosu to input her password into the laptop would be incriminating 'because it might reveal she had control over the laptop and the data there.'”
― David Kravets, Wired
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"The Fifth Amendment protects people from being forced to be a witness against themselves in a criminal proceeding. But its protections are not unlimited.
     The debate, then, is about which pre-decided scenario this new situation fits into. Is a computer password like a key to a lockbox, as the government argues? Or is it akin to a combination to a safe, as Fricosu's attorneys say?
     While the key is a physical thing and not protected by the Fifth Amendment, the Supreme Court has said, a combination — as the 'expression of the contents of an individual's mind' — is. [...]
     Prosecutors, though, say they don't really care about the password itself. They say they will allow [Ramona] Fricosu to enter the password without their looking and won't use whatever inference could be made by Fricosu's ability to unlock the computer against her.
'The government seeks the strongbox's contents,' [Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia] Davies wrote in a case filing, 'not the ability to open the strongbox for itself.'"
― John Ingold, The Denver Post
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