Guy locked-up forever for forgetting his password.

[Aoi Magi]

Yes someone can easily set someone up like this, but what I want to know is should the feds really need to depend on the suspect to reveal the password, or can they, due to circumstantial evidence, legally crack open and check the data themselves? Cause it is pointless to hold him indefinitely and is definitely a violation of his rights... so either they have to let him go, or find some way of checking the evidence without his cooperation. If they can't do the later, then why bother holding on to him?

As someone who has worked in IT for 25 years, I suspect that the federal government could crack the guy's password if they wanted to; however, they would probably need to involve the NSA, and we're talking about, perhaps, tens of thousands of hours of supercomputer time, and it is simply cheaper for the US government to keep the guy in jail then it is to devote a large segment of NSA resources to cracking the guy's password.  But, then again, if it is a spoof container, then it would take more energy than has existed in the entire Universe, both visible and beyond our cosmic horizon, to crack the passphrase using brute-force methods.

So in other words, it is pointless to hold him, and is a waste of time and resources... and a drain on our tax money...

I wonder why the feds couldn't just monitor him and gather some evidence before moving in...