In re Boucher

In re Boucher
Court	United States District Court for the District of Vermont
Full case name	In re Grand Jury Subpoena to Sebastien Boucher
Decided	Feb 19, 2009
Citations	In re Grand Jury Subpoena to Sebastien Boucher, No. 2:06-mj-91, 2009 WL 424718 (D. Vt. Feb 19, 2009), archived from the original.
Case history
Prior actions	Motion to quash subpoena granted, WL 4246473 (D. Vt. 2007).
Holding
Boucher's motion to quash the subpoena was denied. He was ordered to provide an unencrypted version of the hard drive in question. The Government's appeal of the magistrate judge's opinion and order is sustained.
Court membership
Judge sitting	William K. Sessions III
Keywords
encryption, self-incrimination

In re Boucher (case citation: No. 2:06-mJ-91, 2009 WL 424718), is a federal criminal case in Vermont, which was the first to directly address the question of whether investigators can compel a suspect to reveal their encryption passphrase or password, despite the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. A magistrate judge held that producing the passphrase would constitute self-incrimination. In its submission on appeal to the District Court, the Government stated that it does not seek the password for the encrypted hard drive, but only sought to force Boucher to produce the contents of his encrypted hard drive in an unencrypted format by opening the drive before the grand jury. A District Court judge agreed with the government, holding that, given Boucher's initial cooperation in showing some of the content of his computer to border agents, producing the complete contents would not constitute self-incrimination.

In late 2009, Boucher finally gave up his password and investigators found numerous images and videos depicting sexual abuse of children. In January 2010, Boucher was sentenced to 3 years in prison and deported.^[1]