alt Hacker News> Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it,
In the US you it is not legal to be compelled to turn over a password. It's a violation of your fifth amendment rights. In the UK you can be jailed until you turn over the password.
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Well, currently sure.
However, back when the constitution was amended the 5th amendment also applied to your own papers. (How is using something you wrote down not self-incrimination!?).
It only matters if one year in the future it is because all that back data becomes immediately allowed.
There are many jurisdictions in the US (not all!) where you can't be compelled to turn over a password in a criminal case that's specifically against yourself. But that's a narrow exception to the general principle that a court can order you to give them whatever information they'd like.
At Amazon, their travel trainings always recommended giving out your laptop password if asked by law enforcement or immigration, regardless of whether it was legal in the jurisdiction. Then you were to report the incident as soon as possible afterwards, and you'd have to change your password and possibly get your laptop replaced.
That kind of policy makes sense for the employee's safety, but it definitely had me thinking how they might approach other tradeoffs. What if the Department of Justice wants you to hand over some customer data that you can legally refuse, but you are simultaneously negotiating a multi-billion dollar cloud hosting deal with the same Department of Justice? What tradeoff does the company make? Totally hypothetical situation, of course.