The point was that there are people who are not doing anything criminal, but who still need to concern themselves with U.S. criminal statutes. The weaponization of law enforcemen in political conflicts here is a very well known problem.
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I could bet there are less than few countries in the world where the pattern isn’t followed at the moment.
As I see it, and I find it proved in this very topic, when you deduct, atomize the opening premise you get the root cause of the problem on a much broader scale as I quoted yours, where Qubes isn’t the tool that might help you in this. If it’s against the law not to give encryption password, how you can beat that? You can won the battle, but not the war.
So, it has to be their tool: the law, preferably and probably with chances to succeed only from within. To change the system from within. No way from outside. It’s a painful reality fact of the actual world moment.
Sorry, I won’t poison the topic anymore.
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What’s about to encrypt on a password which you can’t remember, written on a paper? If you can get rid of it so that it could not be restored, before the raid, then they can’t decrypt your disk even if you want it.
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This is exactly how you get into bigger trouble you initially were in.
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Depending on which side to look and how to perform it. If they have enough evidence on you without that encrypted disk then it really would do more harm to you than good. But if they only have circumstantial evidence and they need that disk, and you can come up with a plausible excuse for why you no longer have access to that drive then it could help.
And look at what I’ll tell you else. You from the very beginning look at the problem from the wrong side. This is the same as the question about how reliable is a particular cipher. In fact that’s not the point. It’s not about which cipher is more secure, which one can be broken, which can’t. In all systems the weakest link is the human. In 99% they can’t break the cypher but they can (and will try) break you. It’s about your opinion about which OS you would choose for criminal activity. All anonimous OSes are good in their own way and if you choose to use one of them, they probably won’t be able to get you out from under it. But they may even not try. Instead of it they try to catch you using your mistakes in real life. This is how most criminals were caught. It’s much easer to try catch you this way than to “bang head against the wall”. And only if they can’t get you this way they probably try the hardest variant - to try to hack your OS. Then good luck to them! And you can still take action even in the event of such a development. There are methods of counteracting such a threat, which are used. 
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I just wanted to stop by and thank you guys for this conversation.
I don’t have any knowledge to offer here, but the conversation as prompted me to dive deep and understand what my rights are, the limits of those rights, and some of the strategies LE may employ to get at passwords. Especially when crossing international borders. I feel this understanding will give me more confidence if I find myself in a challenging situation in this regard. So again, many thanks for that.
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Moderation note: Kind reminder to everyone that this topic is about collecting criminal cases that involve Qubes OS.
We’re pretty far off-topic, and the conversation hasn’t been about Qubes OS at all for a bit. This category of the forum is strictly about Qubes OS, the off-topic conversations should be moved to other venues lest the topic be closed.
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Summarizing the findings - there’s ONE appearance of Qubes in court paperwork that we have found:
- in an affidavit in support of a whistle blower
- affidavit is from a person NOT qualified as an expert witness
- affidavit posits replacing NSA redaction with non-expert’s personal software.
- Qubes mention in affidavit was purely theoretical
So that’s kind of the end of it. There is no information on a seized Qubes system being used in a criminal case. As a fallback position, looking for cases involving LUKS volume encryption seems to be the right thing to do.
And as a defensive strategy, data at rest that does not need to be readily available can be stashed in Veracrypt or Age containers.
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