albino boo said:
And great day for fraudsters, drug dealers, corrupt politicians, the various mobs, hit men, the Ku Klux clan, the Aryan nation and the other terrorist groups out there. So if Enron had just encrypted all their data they could have walked away scot free after defrauding ten of thousands of poeple. Rod Blagojevich should have sent an encrypted email instead of selling Obama's senate seat on the phone and he wouldn't be doing 14 years and the democratic process would have been for sale. But hey data privacy is way more important than protecting the democratic process.
Uh oh, you are in danger of being in the minority on an internet forum, beware.
In all seriousness though. The fifth amendment isn't about criminals protecting themselves from Crime A when they are guilty. It's about protecting themselves from Crime B in the case where they are innocent of Crime A. Also though, it can apply to Crime A. If a guy pleads not guilty, he is within his right to not say, "I murdered John Doe". It would be contempt of court and obstruction if he had, but it has to be proven that he did it, at which point contempt and obstruction do not matter. No one can say if what he is protecting is proof of guilt in said crime or not. But the important thing to remember is that these laws do not exist to protect criminals, they exist to protect innocent people of being convicted of crimes. All the Prosecution is trying to do is catch somebody for a crime, if they are the one's, great. If they are not the one's, great. All they are trying to do is connect you with the crime in question, regardless of guilt. Being a suspect is good enough for most people to ruin a life anyway. That is what due process is all about. Innocent until proven Guilty. It's far more important that innocent people have the tools to prove their innocence than the prosecution has the tools to put away anybody they see fit to lock up.
I hear people talk the talk about the "cost of freedom". But, by and large, they have it wrong. The cost of freedom is that occasionally guilty men go free in order to protect innocent men from being jailed for crimes they did not commit. If he is guilty, then that sucks. But, that is the cost of freedom, and I am more than happy to pay that.
Like it or not, this is a win for every innocent person who the police have ever wrongly accused of a crime and any future instances of that same thing.
Also, in reference to the security: It's supposed to stop people from getting into your data. A lot of people like to encrypt data so NO ONE but them can access it. Just because I don't want someone getting into my data doesn't mean I'm a terrorist or a criminal, it means I feel the data is private and that is the end of the story.