United States v. Boucher

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This article documents an ongoing legal case.
Information may change rapidly as the case progresses.

United States v. Boucher, 2007 WL 4246473, is a federal criminal case in Vermont, which was the first to directly address the question of whether a criminal defendant can be compelled to reveal his encryption passphrase, despite the U.S. Constitution Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

1 Facts
2 Decision of the United States District Court
3 Sources
4 References

[edit] Facts

The defendant's laptop was inspected when he crossed the border into the U.S. from Canada. Images that allegedly contained child pornography were viewed by border agents who then seized his laptop. The laptop was protected by the PGP Disk encryption program and the government was subsequently unable to read the contents of the drive "Z:", containing the images.

A grand jury then issued a subpoena for the passphrase needed to recover the encryption key that protects the data.

[edit] Decision of the United States District Court

On November 29, 2007, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier of the United States District Court for the District of Vermont stated "Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him."^[1] Accordingly, Niedermeier quashed the subpoena.

On January 2, 2008, the United States appealed the magistrate's opinion to the District Court in a sealed motion (court docket, case #: 2:06-mj-00091-wks-jjn-1).^[2] The appeal is to be heard by U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions.^[3]