A few weeks ago my house sprang a massive leak in the roof during a rainstorm, just as I was preparing for a week-long business trip. I got so stressed, the next morning I forgot the passcode I'd been typing into my iPhone for the last five years. Three days of carefully writing down my attempts didn't work—I hit the ten-mistake limit and the phone auto-wiped.
I invalidated my debit card in a similar event. I used it hours before but suddenly for the life of me I couldn’t remember the 4 digits and nor could my fingers. It was after I heard about a death of a relative. Eventually I remembered but the card was already useless and a new one had been dispatched to me.
Just today (and many times before) I witnessed a coworker flummoxed by their Windows log in PIN not working. They insisted it was the same thing they used to log in not even 10 minutes ago, before locking it to go pee. However perhaps because I was asking for immediate information, the PIN they used countless times per day simply didn't work. I said "don't worry about it, I'll figure it out" and walked away. Few seconds later they shouted down the hall, "It worked this time, what did you need again?"
Which means that someone who forgets their passcode because of the stress of being arrested and threatened with years in prison could easily be wrongfully convicted. It's a horrible law, even for those who don't care about privacy.
IANAL but it sounds like this defense would be received about as well as "Your honor, the defendant was in grave stress of being arrested and threatened with years in prison. That's why he completely forgot why and how he parked his car next to Crosby Lake and was walking in the shallow water, carrying an identified bag, at 3am."
So basically that just proves the parent poster's point because the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove that the defendant was carrying a bag containing a body and the defendant is under no obligation to remember or justify parking his car by the lake at 3am and walking around.
> remember the UK also allows adverse inferences to be made from silence, it is not the US
Even in the US, the law has changed rather drastically[0]:
“The only way to prevent the government from introducing evidence of the suspect's silence at trial is to explicitly invoke (assert) the right to say nothing. In other words, without being warned by the police or advised by a lawyer, and without even the benefit of the familiar Miranda warnings (which might trigger an ‘I want to invoke my right to be silent!’), the interviewee must apparently say words to the effect of, ‘I invoke my privilege against self-incrimination.’”
This is one of the reasons why other countries outside the US aren't as free as the US, even though the US is a complete mess too in different ways. Freedom of both speech and silence are not really respected in law anywhere outside the US to the extent that they are in the US.
The US has guilty pleas, plea bargaining and entrapment. Next to that the right to avoid self-incrimination, which also exists in a lot of Western country, feels like a footnote.
The US laws against self-incriminating aren't unique, and many countries go much further. In Norway, you can't be convicted for lying to police and court at all, if it concerns accusations against you or your closest ones (I think that means your spouse and kids/parents in practice), or if it would cause considerable loss of social reputation or welfare of other kinds.
The lesson to take away from that is to have a smaller compartment (or multiple) inside the computer that contains all the juicy stuff. Unlock the main one, claim to have forgotten the keys for the juicy compartments, and you're keeping it around in hopes of remembering the key one day.