Encryption is nothing like locking in a safe further in a similar situation I'm pretty sure rather than going to court they just open the safe making the example even more useless.
It's a bit like the safe exactly because there's a lot of actual existing precedent where they do not "just open the safe" but require the defendant to produce the key/code to the safe; and instead of attempting to breach the safe, hold the defendant jailed for contempt if they refuse to do so.
In this particular case the authorities are explicitly arguing that there's no good reason to use a different process for passwords as they currently use for safes, and this (requiring the defendant to unlock it) is the standard procedure, not drilling the safe open.
Sure, to technical folks like us, but notice I said "in the eyes of the law". Furthermore, police can not open a safe without a court order, so guess your reply was a bust all around?
Do you have a citation wherein encryption is treated like a safe or are you like most people kind of winging it?
I know they can't open a safe or for that matter a door without a court order. The point was that the comparison between forcing open a safe and forcing someone to produce a passphrase was meaningless because the apparently treacherous question of compulsion to testify against yourself wouldn't be tested when I drill could do the job.
I am not a lawyer but I know enough to know that most people in most discussions are full of it and know little. What actually is mysterious is why people believe that their nonexistent expertise adds to the discussion.
Imagine if the matter were technical and a bunch of non tech people, say the kind who get confused about ram and storage, referring to both as memory,or call the entire thing the cpu were volunteering different insights into the question at hand. It would be useless in a funny sort of way.
In this particular case the authorities are explicitly arguing that there's no good reason to use a different process for passwords as they currently use for safes, and this (requiring the defendant to unlock it) is the standard procedure, not drilling the safe open.