Fifth Amendment

Our great and munificent government seems to be hell-bent on trampling the Bill of Rights. The latest assault is an argument over the Fifth Amendment (Via Tam, Queen of Snark, and Say Uncle). Not recalling just what the Fifth Amendment says, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here is the text:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Whoa! There is a whole lot of stuff in that one little paragraph. Just for grins, I disassembled it so I could more easily see what all it contained. You can see my reformatted version here.

But wait a minute, they are arguing about getting access to an encrypted hard drive. I thought this is why we gave the NSA all that money: so they could buy enormous computers that could decrypt anything. Surely the commercial grade encryption that was used on this laptop would be easy prey for even an amateur computer hacker. On one hand I needed a password for one of my Window's computers, and my son was able to download a program, burn a disk, and run the program on the recalcitrant machine and extract a usable password in less than an hour. On the other hand, the instruction manual for an IBM laptop says that if you encrypt the hard drive, and then forget the password, you may as well throw the hard drive away.