The guy hasn't claimed he forgot the password. If he did that, the case would move forward without it, and the judge would instruct the jury that the defendant claims to have forgotten a password to documents that a sworn officer testified under oath were child porn.

That doesn't sound so good.

So the defense is trying this first. If it doesn't pan out (and it won't, because the 5th amendment doesn't apply to a subpoena for evidence), then they can try the "I forgot" defense at trial.

Wow. You must live in a country where everyone is perfectly moral (by everyone else on the planet's standards) and nobody has ever committed a crime. Where is this wondrous place? Cause last time I checked pretty much every country has citizens who have done much worse than what you describe.

The courts pretty routinely take one person's word over another's, if that one person is a sworn peace officer.

Second, even if the courts doubt the peace officer's word (or the defense wants to refute it) there's a fairly straightforward way to handle that: compel the guy to cough up the documents. The password itself is not incriminating, therefore it's not protected by the 5th. Even still, the court is not demanding the password, just the unencrypted contents of the drive. Again, they have probable cause (the ICE officer's sworn testimony).

Last, the contents of the hard drive is not self-incrimination (though it may be incriminating). It's evidence. Evidence is not protected by the 5th. This guy is withholding evidence that the prosecution wishes to present at trial to make its case. The judge has ruled that the evidence is material to the case, and that a warrant has been issued for it. The defendant is refusing to comply with the warrant. That's all this case is about: there's no 5th amendment element to it.

Miranda doesn't kick in until you've been arrested and questioned by an officer. He wasn't under arrest, thus the officers didn't need to Mirandize him. Hell, this guy wasn't even a suspect at this point. Just a perv who probably forgot his unencrypted kiddie porn drive was mounted when he handed it to the officer.

He's off to prison for a long time, whether he gives up the keys (conviction) or not (contempt). I have no issue with that.

This could cost consumers literally incalculable amounts of synergy and innovation.

Just because the amount of "synergy and innovation" is incalculable, that doesn't mean it's very much. Of whatever "synergy and innovation" is.

Why won't the government just let capitalism work?

Hear, hear! Just look what deregulated capitalism has done for the financial markets!

I second the motion.

QuickBooks Pro (at least the Mac version) uses SQLite as its file format, which makes getting direct access to accounting data really, really simple.

Here's the copyright filing from government records, 1/24/08...

There used to be a GUI app which sort of helped you mount SSHFS volumes, but it was very unsupported and I could never get it to work at all.

I built sshfs for MacFUSE 1, and the binaries still work under MacFuse 2, which is handy. However, it was an PITA to build, as MacFuse had to generate the makefiles for sshfs, gettext, et al. If you followed the directions it did work, but it took a long time to get running.

A GUI sshfs that was supported and worked would be a great addition. A protocol helper would be even better, so that I could tell somebody to hit command K from the Finder, enter "sshfs:user@host:/path" and hit return and have the volume show up on their desktop.

Sadly I don't have the time to put it together.