Well yes, the whole point of the 4th amendment is so that we can "trust" (in the sense of feeling comfortable with) the government as a whole when it comes to searches because of the requirement for a warrant. In other words, the government has "access" in the technical sense of the word (the police can technically break into your house any time they want), but the requirement for a warrant is supposed to prevent them from misusing that access (they'll get in legal trouble if they break into your house without a warrant).
I wasn't suggesting entitlement so much as practicality. Up until recently, the distinction you're talking about didn't really exist. A warrant might not give police an "entitlement" to something in your house, but there wasn't really a lot you could do stop them from getting it. The best you could do is hide it which isn't very practical in a lot of situations.
But with an encrypted document, suddenly you have new protections. As you suggest, a warrant does the police no good because you also have the right (under the 5th amendment) not to tell them how to access it. Unlike a safe, forcing open an encrypted file might turn out to be impossible. Now you have a technical protection against searches that goes way beyond the legal one found in the 4th amendment.
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I think it's an interesting way to look at it and at least one of the points I saw in the article. Technology is less a means to ensure 4th amendment rights and more a means to go beyond them...for both good and bad reasons.
Yeah, I think constitutionally speaking there is implied a level of trust in the government and legal process — hence words like "reasonable." I thought that since trust doesn't seem to be an option any more, we have to go beyond what is guaranteed us by the constitution (to little effect in this case) and secure it by other means. That way the constitutional rights are not an ideal to be aimed for, but a ground floor at which to level out.
I would think that this technology as described would bring it back to the choice of personal freedom... If authorities wanted/demanded access to my secure information, I have the option of refusing and being limited in my freedom (going to jail).
Now I, as a (hopefully) rational human being, have a choice again.
I wasn't suggesting entitlement so much as practicality. Up until recently, the distinction you're talking about didn't really exist. A warrant might not give police an "entitlement" to something in your house, but there wasn't really a lot you could do stop them from getting it. The best you could do is hide it which isn't very practical in a lot of situations.
But with an encrypted document, suddenly you have new protections. As you suggest, a warrant does the police no good because you also have the right (under the 5th amendment) not to tell them how to access it. Unlike a safe, forcing open an encrypted file might turn out to be impossible. Now you have a technical protection against searches that goes way beyond the legal one found in the 4th amendment.
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I think it's an interesting way to look at it and at least one of the points I saw in the article. Technology is less a means to ensure 4th amendment rights and more a means to go beyond them...for both good and bad reasons.