Two rulings this week helped to clarify the circumstances under which a defendant can be compelled to reveal the contents of an encrypted hard drive. On Wednesday, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals let stand a judge’s ruling in a Colorado case that the defendant in a mortgage fraud case could be compelled to produce the contents of her encrypted laptop. But on Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a Florida contempt of court charge against a suspect in a child pornography case who refused to decrypt the encrypted contents of several hard drives
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A Stanford researcher discovered that Google was purposefully circumventing the privacy settings in the iPhone’s web browser in order to store cookies that track users’ movements online. As soon as this was revealed publicly, first in a Wall Street Journal report, Google stopped the practice. But the question remains: Why the heck would Google do such a thing in the first place?

Google says it’s all a misunderstanding.
Google Snooping

American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case.

Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination.