humo[u]r in law

["Peter Williams" <peterw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"SEC. 14. FAILURE TO DECRYPT INFORMATION OBTAINED UNDER COURT ORDER. Whoever
is required by an order of any court to provide to the court or any other
party any information in such person's possession which has been encrypted
and who, having possession of the key or such other capability to decrypt
such information into the readable or comprehensible format of such
information prior to its encryption, fails to provide such information in
accordance with the order in such readable or comprehensible form"

If an certificate-bearing, encrypted S/MIME message
(BER-encoded) is encrypted under an S/MIME process,
and a party hands over the keying material necessary to
decrypt the payload to ANY court (including an International
court presumably), is the result "readable and comprehensible" - being
BER-encoded?

The corollary of this, if true, is that it would
define all BER-encoded data (such as certificates)
as having a readable and comprehensible format. This
has relevance to that debate which demands that consumers
have obtained "readable and comprensible" certificates
before they can be held to have truly accepted
a certificate.

Only following acceptance, in many law environments nowadays,
is the certificate valid, and only then can one
establish the validity of a certificate, and/or
the validity of a particular certificate chain.