Historically, US courts have declared that giving a password is proof that you control the given asset and that this can be incriminating.
In practice, juries will take a refusal to divulge a password as evidence of guilt, the cops will use it as an excuse for even greater brutality, the FBI is perfectly willing to hold you without trial for years on end, and in most cases they don't need it anyway because everything lives on someone else's computer and they're perfectly willing to hand your data over if they haven't already. Furthermore, because the defense is founded on the principle that the password serves as evidence that you owned the encrypted data, if the prosecution is able to prove that you owned the encrypted data in any other way, that protection goes away.
> In Boucher, production of the unencrypted
> drive was deemed not to be a self-incriminating
> act, as the government already had
> sufficient evidence to tie the encrypted
> data to the defendant
I am, of course, not a lawyer. I'm just summarizing easily available information, i.e. wikipedia.
In practice, juries will take a refusal to divulge a password as evidence of guilt, the cops will use it as an excuse for even greater brutality, the FBI is perfectly willing to hold you without trial for years on end, and in most cases they don't need it anyway because everything lives on someone else's computer and they're perfectly willing to hand your data over if they haven't already. Furthermore, because the defense is founded on the principle that the password serves as evidence that you owned the encrypted data, if the prosecution is able to prove that you owned the encrypted data in any other way, that protection goes away.
I am, of course, not a lawyer. I'm just summarizing easily available information, i.e. wikipedia.