The laptop does not "contain" what they are looking for. It contains gibberish.
If they had her on tape saying "the evidence is in my house" and then they searched her house and didn't find anything, could they force her to tell them where the evidence was?
No.
Any position based on an analog to a vault, is ignorant of the facts. Encrypted data is not locked in anything. It's scrambled.
Here's another analogue:
A locked safe on your portch carries an expectation of privacy. It can't be opened by the police without a warrant. A dropped disk in plain site on your steps does not. The police could copy the disk, break its encryption and use the data as evidence against you.
Why? Because encrypted data isn't "locked", it's scrambled. If a credible expert can unscramble it, then reading it was not a "search". It's equivalent to reading a paper taken from your garbage.
The tape recording of her changes nothing about the facts of what the contes of the drive are (gibberish), nor what the nature of decryption is (testimony). Any judicial holdings to the contrary are erroneous violations of the constitution and should be vacated.
If they had her on tape saying "the evidence is in my house" and then they searched her house and didn't find anything, could they force her to tell them where the evidence was?
No.
Any position based on an analog to a vault, is ignorant of the facts. Encrypted data is not locked in anything. It's scrambled.
Here's another analogue:
A locked safe on your portch carries an expectation of privacy. It can't be opened by the police without a warrant. A dropped disk in plain site on your steps does not. The police could copy the disk, break its encryption and use the data as evidence against you.
Why? Because encrypted data isn't "locked", it's scrambled. If a credible expert can unscramble it, then reading it was not a "search". It's equivalent to reading a paper taken from your garbage.
The tape recording of her changes nothing about the facts of what the contes of the drive are (gibberish), nor what the nature of decryption is (testimony). Any judicial holdings to the contrary are erroneous violations of the constitution and should be vacated.