Can it be dangerous to forget your passwords?
<p>Suppose I travel with my old notebook, where there is a lot of old stuff on hard drive, including the contents of the disk of my previous computer, including parts of disk content of my computer before that, all dating back to at least year 2000 or thereabouts. Some of the content is in encrypted archives. I am not 100% confident that I can remember all the passwords.</p>

<p>Reading about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law" rel="nofollow">key disclosure law</a>, traveling in this arrangement looks like a dangerous thing to do. Is it? Or not really? If not, please explain why not. If it is, are there any precedents?</p>

<p>It is not a crime to have encrypted files for which you don't have the password anymore. </p>

<p>You get into trouble if you do all these at the same time: You become a crime suspect. The police suspects that your computer contains evidence of the crime. The police gets a warrant to search your computer. Encrypted files are found, with a reasonable suspicion that these files contain evidence of a crime. And then you have refuse to or have no ability to decrypt the files. </p>

<p>I'd recommend that if you think the risk is too high then you try decrypting the files in question, and if you can't decrypt them then you might as well delete them since they are no use anyway. </p>

<p>In the end it's the same as walking around town with a gun in a way that is legal (for example in the USA that should be possible). If by coincidence you walk along some place where at around the same time a gun murder happens, then you might be in trouble. If it is known that you walked there with a gun, and the gun cannot be found (and you cannot show that the bullet didn't come from your gun), you might be in trouble. Even if you did nothing wrong. </p>

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