[RSchaeffer]

Thanks for sharing Kerr's articles! I wasn't familiar with this issue, so I read them, and in my opinion, I think he's dead wrong (and the 3rd Circuit ruling). The argument that by disclosing his password, Doe is only admitting, "I know the password," which is a forgone conclusion, is nonsense. That statement necessarily carries with it a number of additional statements, including "Very few other people (if any) also have this password" by virtue of what a password is, and "I have read/write access to this hard drive," which when coupled with the previous statement, leads to the conclusion "I wrote the material on this hard drive to this hard drive." Kerr's argument is basically "Doe is only admitting to the premise" while ignoring that an entire chain of reasoning necessarily follows from the premise.

[siler]

With a safe, as with any encrypted document, there are a finite number of keys. I think that invalidates the idea of possession of the password being important, at least from a "purely lawful" point of view.

Read/write access is basically physical access. Anyone with enough resources could accomplish physical access.

It's possible I'm being paranoid, but it seems like most of law is based on series of assumptions. It isn't a purely logical idea, which is why we have so much fun arguing about it. It is fundamentally the hope of writing down logic in a language that doesn't, unambiguously, contain it.