I am no fan of compelled decryption, and believe it is a violation of 5th amendment rights. That being said, I think the government's argument is stronger than usual having proven that he has accessed files regularly in the encrypted drive by showing logs of regular access to content with suspicious filenames.
The police have a fundamentally different argument here than "it happened to be in his possession".
I agree, and looking at the story that is available to us here, the guy in question is very suspect.
However, that does not mean we can or should change the rules (or define new rules) to put him in jail. I'd prefer they use another way to convict this guy. I'm also careful not to condemn a suspect based on what the media reports about him and his case (the court of public opinion is a dangerous thing).
The fifth amendment is one of the few defenses you can call on when facing the incredibly skewed US legal system, and should not be chipped away at, even in a case like this.
>That being said, I think the government's argument is stronger than usual having proven that he has accessed files regularly in the encrypted drive by showing logs of regular access to content with suspicious filenames.
I'm not sure why the case has to stop while the drive remains encrypted then. If they do get the drive decrypted and find nothing (perhaps he held no files and is protesting against forced decryption or they simply have the wrong drive) that will hurt the prosecution.
To me, the judge has basically said you can be locked up indefinitely for accessing suspicious file names. I'm not going to lie though, 20,000 entries would make me pretty fucking suspicious. I think almost all of us would immediately report that to the cops if we saw that in our networks without verifying what's inside.
The police have a fundamentally different argument here than "it happened to be in his possession".