Cite as: 530 U. S. 27 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
ceived the incriminating documents of which it made "substantial use . . . in the investigation that led to the indictment." Brief for United States 3.
For these reasons, we cannot accept the Government's submission that respondent's immunity did not preclude its derivative use of the produced documents because its "pos-session of the documents [was] the fruit only of a simple physical act—the act of producing the documents." Id., at 29. It was unquestionably necessary for respondent to make extensive use of "the contents of his own mind" in identifying the hundreds of documents responsive to the requests in the subpoena. See Curcio v. United States, 354 U. S. 118, 128 (1957); Doe v. United States, 487 U. S., at 210. The assembly of those documents was like telling an inquisitor the combination to a wall safe, not like being forced to surrender the key to a strongbox. Id., at 210, n. 9. The Government's anemic view of respondent's act of production as a mere physical act that is principally nontestimonial in character and can be entirely divorced from its "implicit" testimonial aspect so as to constitute a "legitimate, wholly independent source" (as required by Kastigar) for the documents produced simply fails to account for these realities.
In sum, we have no doubt that the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination protects the target of a grand jury investigation from being compelled to answer questions designed to elicit information about the existence of sources of potentially incriminating evidence. That constitutional privilege has the same application to the testimonial aspect of a response to a subpoena seeking discovery of those sources. Before the District Court, the Government arguably conceded that respondent's act of production in this case had a testimonial aspect that entitled him to respond to the subpoena by asserting his privilege against self-incrimination. See 167 F. 3d, at 580 (noting District
ton rev. 1961) (describing a subpoena duces tecum as "process relying on [the witness'] moral responsibility for truthtelling").
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