It's regrettable that the journalists present chose not to report the judge's actual explanation of the orders he was making instead of just a few quotes taken out of context - which makes it impossible to know whether the finding was reasonable or not. (In England, while almost all higher court judgments are transcribed at public expense and put online, Crown Court hearings are not.)

This is completely false. I have set out an overview of the process of proving that someone has the decryption key here.

Then you should not be found guilty - I've set out the process that is followed in another comment. (In reality, if it is plausible in the circumstances that you have simply forgotten the password, it is unlikely that it would actually get anywhere near court to begin with.)

We don't know the facts of this case - unfortunately the journalists chose to give us a few selected quotes out of context, rather than a transcript of the judge's entire remarks - but it sounds like the judge may have thought that the claim to have forgotten the password was just the latest in a series of lies that the defendant has told to try to avoid giving up the data. If that is the case, and the defendant has genuinely forgotten his password, that is very unfortunate (although no different to any other trial, in that if you squander your credibility you may find that your truthful remarks are not believed).

Assuming that the judge followed the requirements of the legislation - and there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that they didn't - that question will have been answered in the following way:

1. By default, the prosecution would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant has possession of the key (in this case, by knowing the password).
2. However, where it has been proved that they had the key, there is a presumption that they still have it. I expect that applied here, since they could probably show that he had accessed the encrypted data.
3a. If the defendant does not bring any evidence, then the presumption will stand and they will be found guilty.
3b. If the defendant disputes it, they do not have to prove that they do not have the key. They only need to show enough evidence to "raise an issue" - i.e. for there to be reasonable doubt as to whether they have it. At that point the prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that they do.

I don't know the specific details here - it would have been helpful if the journalists present had transcribed the judge's entire remarks, rather than just presenting one or two quotes out of context. However, I could imagine a situation where a suspect was known to have used the password regularly up until the date of his arrest, at which point he claimed suddenly to have forgotten it, and where that simply wasn't believable - particularly if he had lied to the police or the court about other matters, and had been generally obstructive*. I would also point out that the judge will (unless he chose not to take the stand) have heard whatever Wilson's explanation was from his own mouth, and will have therefore been in a better position than any of us to judge whether he was telling the truth.

*Which you are, of course, free to do, but which is unlikely to improve your credibility.

Statutes like PACE lack one essential attribute of a constitution: they are not entrenched, so Parliament could remove the protections by a simple majority. If you don't include that as a requirement of a constitution, it is difficult to see what the word "constitution" means.

There have been suggestions that there is an English constitution (it's difficult to speak of a UK constitution, since the UK does not have a single legal system - PACE, for example, is part of the law of England and Wales, with some application in Scotland). The House of Lords, for example, suggested that an attempt to abolish the right to trial, or to extend the length of Parliament, would simply not be effective and would be ignored by the Courts. In practice, if those were attempted the result would be constitutional crisis and much would depend on the practical question of who forces like the police listened to.

I'd also point out that the idea that England has an unwritten constitution is fairly old and often repeated - but there are a lot of contemporary legal scholars who think the extent of any unwritten constitution that does exist is so small, and so toothless, that it's a bit disingenuous to say that it exists at all.

You may be right that you are completely unaffected by advertising. However, there are two things that should give you pause:
1. The vast majority of people are regularly influenced by advertisements.
2. The majority of people think that they are not influenced by advertisements.

In other words, there are lots of people who think, like you, that advertising doesn't influence their decisions - and mostly they are wrong.

I'm not sure that it's as crystal-clear as you say:
1. Where does it say the warrant must be public? A secret warrant seems like it would qualify as long as it fit the requirements set out.

2. It doesn't explicitly say "all searches require a warrant"; it only refers to "unreasonable searches". Does a reasonable search not require a warrant? In fact, where does this expressly say that any searches require a warrant?

3. Where does it say that this applies to electronic communications (or any non-physical communications)? Are electronic communications "persons, houses, papers, [or] effects"? What's the "place to be searched" if you intercept broadcast information?

One of the great difficulties of constitutional study is that the US constitution is pretty vaguely drafted.

This has very clear and obvious potential implications for justice. Open justice has been a cornerstone of British justice and we should be very careful about derogations from it.

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However.

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What I think is missing from the vast majority of the comments to this article is the recognition that this is a very difficult situation. You can imagine the possibility that, for example, a long-term intelligence source reveals a terrorist plot - but where to prove that in open court would reveal the existence of the source, shutting the door to future intelligence and possibly leading to an informant's horrific death.

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You may think that the inviolability of the principle of open justice is such that no derogation is permissible from it. If you do, however, you should still be open about the fact that this might mean that known terrorists cannot be prosecuted - or, God forbid, are allowed to carry out deadly attacks - because the cost of losing our intelligence sources is judged too great.

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It might also be worth considering where the alternative leads. If the intelligence agencies are left with the dilemma above, will they in fact choose to allow the terrorist to go free or to perpetrate an attack - or is it more likely that they will deal with the threat in secret, without the oversight of the courts? It would be unfortunate if we were so unwilling to sacrifice any of the protections of a suspect that we ended up, in practice, losing them all.

And people hate it. Making the job more unpleasant - meaning that you either need to compensate somehow or risk getting worse applicants to join - is a valid concern.

I don't really think it was unduly defensive, when you were saying you had easily found examples, for the GP to point out that your links weren't examples at all.

I think you've missed the point - he's not talking about prison labour, he's talking about generating revenue by locking up more prisoners because they get paid per-prisoner by the state.

I'm not sure that I see your point. He didn't say it was literally impossible - he said that the threshold for getting the jobs was very high.

Imagine two people who need to walk to the job centre to get a job. One has to climb over a series of low hurdles to get there; the other has to climb a series of 10ft walls.

You would be completely correct to say of the second person "those are all challenges, but not ones that can't be overcome. Can you honestly say that second person has worked hard and trained to climb walls all their lives?". Completely correct - but also completely missing the point.

I would say that it's the sign of a "broken" constitution - or at least one that isn't really sufficiently well drafted.

The reason for the Courts looking at historical evidence is that the constitution isn't drafted in sufficiently precise terms to enforce it on its own. Look at the text of the First Amendment for an example - read literally it would seem to mean that Congress could not prohibit human sacrifice, if that were necessary for the free exercise of a religion, and could not prohibit false advertising, which would be free speech; but that seems an unlikely intention and an undesirable result.

In an ideal world I think you would agree on the exact rights that you want to give constitutional protection - and their precise extent - and enshrine those in a new constitution. In practice, of course, that's impossible because so many different groups use the wiggle room to their advantage to try to permit, or prohibit, their cause of choice.

All that the GP's statement requires is that you don't punish any more than is required for deterrence.

That would mean conducting research into the severity of punishment required to deter the commission of different crimes - and if you found that (for example) imprisoning people for over two years doesn't increase the deterrence effect, the sentence would never be over two years unless either rehabilitation or public protection required it.

Legality is simply the inverse of illegality.

If something is "legal" that does not mean that you have a right to do it which cannot be abridged. The legislature can ban things that are legal. You are thinking of things to which you have a constitutionally protected right, which are a subset of the set of things that are legal.

(Source: I'm a lawyer)