Jailed for refusing to tell Police a password

[R1Geezer]

On the front page of the Metro it says that a teenager has been jailed for refusing to reveal a password. Does anyone know the law for this? It's in Scoitland so maybe it's different. It seems to me that you should not be forced to reveal passwords, seems a lttle out of order to sling him in jail. Presumably it's on some sort of "obstruction" charge, any thoughts and opinions on this? Anyone have a detailed understanding of this area? thanks

[R1Geezer]

the data is encrypted booldawg. Doesn't matter what reads it it's gobledegook until decrypted.

[rov1200]

People who have lost their passwords sometimes use Cain & Abel

http://www.oxid.it/cain.html

[ChuckFickens]

I should imagine the police and government security services use something a little more advanced than a free password cracker!

[society]

How advanced can it be when it's not even making a dent furthermore a crack.

[birdie1971]

If his password contains characters such as “!”, “;”, “^”, etc. and is 50 characters long, then a brute force dictionary attack will be useless. So we're left with a sequential solution.

For all those folks who watch Spooks and think that encrypted files can be decoded in a matter of hours or days - you are sadly mistaken. Even with a super-computer, it would take longer than the universe has been in existence to crack the password.