Interesting Defcon17 (an attorney gave a talk in this video):
This Defcon presentation is all about Constitutional rights on your computers.
Also the following webpage at Cnet.com
When one thinks someone want to read their laptop content, and then encrypt the data, that may not be enough to prevent the government whose border you enter to read or copy the files. Especially if it is something they really want to view.
Here is also a Slate.com article on this subject, and the relevant paragraph:
“These questions illustrate the contemporary challenges of determining the scope of the Fifth Amendment. It was ratified in 1791 and now is being applied, with the aid of a 1970s-era legal precedent, to 21st-century digital encryption. In the pre-digital age, there was a distinct boundary between the information that resided only in our minds and the information that we committed to paper. The former was afforded strong constitutional protection; the latter, much less so. But modern encryption blurs that boundary by enabling the storage of essentially infinite amounts of information that can be unlocked only by passwords stored in our minds. (If only all criminals hid Post-Its with their passwords under their keyboards.) Put another way, encryption creates the possibility that our digital data and devices will be viewed, in the legal sense, as extensions of ourselves.”
The problem is what can law enforcement force you to divulge when part of your files are encrypted? For one thing some law enforcement think you have something to hide, which may cause you to lose your equipment for some time. It all depends on the situation.