[Johnny555]

That seems like a plausible excuse. Years ago I encrypted an email archive with what I thought was an easy to remember password. But I've forgotten the password. I remember some of the password so I wrote a password cracker to try variants of that, but I still can't get in.

If the feds seized my hard drive and wanted me to decrypt that file, can they lock me up until I give up the password even if I really have forgotten it?

[tedunangst]

I suppose the judge will consider such factors as whether the drive is attached to your computer or shows signs of recent use. If your shell history shows you mounting the drive the day before arrest, that wouldn't play well.

[ClumsyPilot]

To lock up people forever for such things is to me unthinkable. There is no established responsibility to remember you password, or keep it safe. Memory failures are not very predictable

[chii]

The law often uses the "reasonable person" as a standard to measure such responsibilities. So would it make sense for a reasonable person to forget a password they typed in only yesterday (and/or perhaps many times before)?

[Johnny555]

So would it make sense for a reasonable person to forget a password they typed in only yesterday

Judging by our password reset request tickets, I can say "yes"

I've even forgotten a password just minutes after typing it. And I can't even tell you my desktop password despite typing it a dozen times a day for nearly 6 months. I once tried to give my wife the password over the phone and I couldn't do it without a keyboard to silently type on.

[pas]

I think all of these are taken into account. The defendant is usually given opportunity to just type the password to decrypt the drive.

Usually only passwords are assumed to be remembered that are used many times with no sign of changing it.

Still, the defendant can claim that the whole ordeal of arrest and trial took a serious toll on his/her memory. Of course the judge might or might not believe it.

[Johnny555]

I don't think you've ever worked at a corporate help desk -- people do forget passwords, even ones they've used for months - they'll swear up and down that the AD server is wrong.

I once helped a professor decrypt a zip file by brute forcing the password (it was only 6 characters long). He swore it was his wife's name and that the file must be corrupt because he surely knows how to type her name. Turned out that it was a misspelling of her name, and he said "Oh right, I misspelled it to make it harder to guess".

[brewdad]

That depends. I don't "remember" any of my passwords because I use a software program to randomly generate them as I need them and them store them for me. Occasionally, my password manager doesn't prompt me to save this new password and by the time I realize it, my clipboard has forgotten it or I've filled it with something else.

More than once, the first thing I've done after confirming a new account via email is reset my forgotten password. Am I guilty if I didn't bother to reset it right away?

[himinlomax]

I once forgot a 4 digit pin code I had used hundreds of time. It was scary, I thought I was going insane. I had to have it reset. (What I think happened is that I inverted two of the digits.)

[Hitton]

Exactly same thing happened to me few months ago. Similar thing not that long before that with normal password. I was afraid that my memories are starting to fail me (we have a Alzheimer disease in our family, but I'm still way too young for that). And when I was teen, I kept encrypted text files with passwords, for which I managed to forget password too. I was lucky that I still remembered most of the passwords inside and was able to reset the rest.

[sandov]

By that standard, an innocent, unreasonable person would go to jail.

[sjy]

It’s not contempt if you forget the password, but saying you forgot doesn’t mean the judge has to believe you.