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It's unconstitutional for cops to force phone unlocking, court rules:
Indiana's Supreme Court has ruled that the Fifth Amendment allows a woman accused of stalking to refuse to unlock her iPhone. The court held that the Fifth Amendment's rule against self-incrimination protected Katelin Seo from giving the police access to potentially incriminating data on her phone.
The courts are divided on how to apply the Fifth Amendment in this kind of case. Earlier this year, a Philadelphia man was released from jail after four years of being held in contempt in connection with a child-pornography case. A federal appeals court rejected his argument that the Fifth Amendment gave him the right to refuse to unlock hard drives found in his possession. A Vermont federal court reached the same conclusion in 2009—as did a Colorado federal court in 2012, a Virginia state court in 2014, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2014.
But other courts in Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have reached the opposite conclusion, holding that forcing people to provide computer or smartphone passwords would violate the Fifth Amendment.
Lower courts are divided about this issue because the relevant Supreme Court precedents all predate the smartphone era. To understand the two competing theories, it's helpful to analogize the situation to a pre-digital technology.
There's much more to the matter than just the excerpt shown here -- it's well worth reading the entire article so as to not argue from ignorance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 25 2020, @07:05AM (7 children)
then it's protected.
Anything in your mind is protected. That goes for passwords, pins, gestures, and what-have-you. If there is a key laying in the console of your car, it is NOT protected by the fifth, or the pint, or the quart. If you wrote the password on the sun visor of your car, it is not protected. If you wrote it on the inside of your tire, before having the tire mounted, the knowledge that you did so is protected, but the tire is not.
The law can't threaten, torture, coerce, or otherwise force knowledge out of your mind, or out of your mouth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @07:53AM (2 children)
I don't know, something like a chunk of lead in a copper jacket?
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday June 25 2020, @08:43AM (1 child)
I heard that Elon Musk is working on a more sophisticated way to get into your skull.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @10:45AM
He got into Grimes pants, so he can get into your skull.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @10:01AM (1 child)
Tell that to anyone tortured in the last few decades because they didn't know or didn't want to tell their aggressors something they wanted to hear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Example_cases [wikipedia.org]
That constitution, it's just a piece of paper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @05:18PM
"That constitution, it's just a piece of paper."
that's true when/if The People won't do their duty.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:27PM
But the man can, and does
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Friday June 26 2020, @02:22PM
Hiding/withholding evidence is illegal. Yes, the knowledge might be protected in your head until we invent mind reading, but if the court could prove that you hid evidence to a crime you would still go to prison just for that without the need to prove that you committed the first crime. Just like all of these people who refused to hand over passwords. This is spelled out in our legal system and probably has thousands of years of precedent.