Computers, Privacy & the Constitution

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MatthewEckmanFirstPaper 5 - 04 Jun 2009 - Main.MatthewEckman
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 -- By MatthewEckman - 08 Mar 2009
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>		PAPER IN PROGRESS
 The Electronic Frontier Foundation highly recommends that people encrypt their hard drives. I have not taken their advice. What a pain in the ass that would be. Of course it is probably not all that difficult to do, and it's probably not all that big a pain in the ass to type in an extra password every once in a while. Still, though--a bit of a pain in the ass. I imagine that I will eventually get around to installing some version of PGP some day soon, but so far I have been unable to convince myself that encrypting my hard drive is even so minimally important to offset the small amount of ass-pain I would suffer in carrying it out. When I imagine potential threats, I see clearly that if my laptop were stolen by black hats I could have serious problems on my hands and would wish that I had encrypted; but the odds of that happening seem rather too remote to require immediate precautionary measures. And I am completely unable to imagine that I have anything to fear from government agents seizing my computer for the purposes of criminal prosecution. In this class I sometimes feel as though I am missing some big piece of the puzzle--that I really should be more concerned about the government and threats posed to my privacy. But I just don't understand why. Is it because the government might fall into the hands of paranoid fascists who are willing to ruin lives to quell dissent? Is it because some day a nefarious government agent--a corrupt DA, maybe--might abuse the power of the state to cause me personal harm? Am I supposed to be really worried about the possibility that a government agent, as opposed to a common criminal, will use personal information on my computer to blackmail me? Are any constitutional issues at all implicated by this possibility? Wouldn't that be a simple crime, or even a tort? I just can't get worked up over possibilities like these. I have no terrorist plots or child pornography stored on my hard drive. But I probably do have information that would be valuable to non-state criminals: passwords, credit card information, etc. So while it would be no doubt worthwhile to really try to survey and appreciate--in a way I apparently fail to do at present--the threats to my life and liberty posed by government that could be addressed by encrypting my hard drive, I will not do that here. Instead I will look into a particular Fifth Amendment issue that arises in connection with encrypted hard drives.

Revision 5r5 - 04 Jun 2009 - 13:14:57 - MatthewEckman
Revision 4r4 - 17 Apr 2009 - 01:48:50 - EbenMoglen
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