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News.com is carrying a story about a man who allegedly stored pornographic images of children on his work computer. According to the article the man stored the files in encrypted .Zip files. Luckily in this case the archive files were from an older version of WinZip and not WinZip 9.0 which uses much more secure 128- and 256-bit key AES encryption. The article author Declan McCullagh made an important point which made this story worth posting here.

The reason I’m mentioning this case is to argue that as encryption becomes more widespread–it’s part of OS X and Vista, after all–police will encounter it more frequently, and not just in cases involving illegal images. And not all encrypted files will be as easy to brute-force. Which means that the outcome of the Boucher case becomes more important than ever.

For those of you who haven’t been following this case, a Judge had previously ruled the man could not be forced to divulge encryption passphrase . As our technology makes advances so do the legal repercussions.