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The FBI used a suspect's face to unlock his iPhone in Ohio case
When Apple debuted Face ID with the iPhone X last year, it raised an interesting legal question: can you be compelled to unlock your phone by looking at it? In an apparent first, Forbes reports that the FBI got a suspect to unlock his phone during a raid in August.
In August, the FBI raided the home of Grant Michalski, looking for evidence that he had sent or received child pornography. They were armed with a search warrant [warning: this documentation contains explicit descriptions of sexual abuse] which allowed them to search Michalski's computer for evidence, and during the raid, agents recovered his iPhone X.
The agents who found the iPhone asked Michalski to unlock the device via Face ID, which he did. They "placed the [phone] into airplane mode and examined it by looking through the files and folders manually and documenting the findings with pictures."
The facial unlocking was voluntary (or so they claim), and the Columbus Police and FBI have devices capable of bypassing the phone's passcode protection. So much for security.
Also at AppleInsider.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday October 01 2018, @03:52PM (4 children)
So the short version of your argument appears to be: Possession and/or distribution of child pornography should not be a crime. Maybe not, but right now it is under US law. If you have a problem with that, that's something to bring up to your Congresscritter's office, not a reason for the FBI to suddenly not have a right to investigate this dude's actions.
I'm guessing that if you sat on his jury in any trial that arose from this, you'd nullify, am I right?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday October 01 2018, @04:07PM
The suspect need not actually possess or provide any CP, it's the simple communication that is a felony
It's in the Wikipedia first amendment article
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @04:15PM (2 children)
If the fact of possession were the only fact established by the prosecution, I would nullify if I were in the jury box. Call me a pedophile then. I'm already apparently an incel because I've only had sex with men. Homosexuality in men is already linked, according to the homophobic authoritarians, with pedophilia.
So plant some CP on me.... after all, that's all you have to do to prove that yet another homosexual incel is also a pedophile. Right? Because police would never do such a thing as planting evidence? (Do I really need to link you to article after article documenting police getting caught planting "evidence?")
The reason is that the idea of contraband is itself flimsy and dangerous, precisely because of the ease of planting evidence. We should go after those who can be proven to be willful (that mens rea thing) distributors. Mere possession of anything only provides an easy way for power to be abused.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 01 2018, @08:01PM (1 child)
I'm not a real believer in this argument, but it should be mentioned.
Theory is, if there weren't people out there seeking, and oftentimes willing to pay for, CP, the producers wouldn't be producing it. Thus - possessions contributes to actual child sexual abuse.
In my limited research, monetary profit is at best a tertiary concern for most producers of CP. One CP ring was discovered in which CP was traded like-for-like. The only way to "buy" the stuff, was to produce and trade your own stuff. And . . . I suppose that particular CP ring supports the theory I've already mentioned.
Whatever theory you might work with, I'm certain that a lot of child porn is not porn at all. If a naked child runs through the room when a photo is snapped, that child's bare buttocks constitute child porn in the eyes of some law enforcement. It doesn't matter how, or why, that bare-assed child managed to run into the room at the wrong(?) moment - the bare ass is enough to arrest and investigate.
https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2009/09/bath-photos-wal-mart-what-is-child-pornography.html [findlaw.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:09AM
The counterargument is that most of the CP is freely available, so you could just ban paying for it (through any means) and producing it.
Another counterargument is that it's still the fault of the producers, and that they don't have to produce CP to meet the demand. It's still entirely on them.
What's funny is that many organizations like the FBI argue that CP harms victims each time it is looked at, so it's harmful even if it was not paid for at all. Then, the FBI hosts CP itself on honeypot websites. The hypocrisy is both hilarious and sad.