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posted by takyon on Friday December 28 2018, @12:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the dead-man's-chest dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

How police are using corpses to unlock phones

Police in Largo, Florida, recently tried to use a dead man's finger to open his phone. This was to the complete astonishment of his family and probably also the staff at the Sylvan Abbey Funeral Home. Detectives just rolled right in with Linus F. Phillip's phone and asked staff where his corpse was. They then attempted to unlock his phone by pressing his hands and fingers on to the fingerprint sensor. The dead man's fiancée, Victoria Armstrong, told press, "I just felt so disrespected and violated."

Mr. Phillip, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed outside a gas station after police claimed he tried to drive away during a search. His death was ruled a "justifiable homicide." His family does not trust the investigation into his death. "They were trying to open up that cellphone using a dead man's finger," the family's attorney, John Trevena, said. "That's disgusting beyond words."

Attempts by police to use the dead man's hands for what they claimed was "to preserve evidence" by unlocking his phone were unsuccessful. The alleged evidence on his phone, the press wrote, was "to aid in the investigation into Phillip's death and a separate inquiry into drugs," according to Lt. Randall Chaney.

Like it or not, what the police did was legal -- and it's becoming a common practice. In November 2016, FBI agents used the bloody finger belonging to Ohio State University killer Abdul Razak's iPhone in hopes of finding information and evidence. They got the timing wrong, missing the window before the phone required a passcode and ended up cracking the device with other means.

That was the first publicly known instance of posthumous Touch ID access attempts by authorities, though there have been more since. "Separate sources close to local and federal police investigations in New York and Ohio," Forbes wrote in March, "who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to speak on record, said it was now relatively common for fingerprints of the deceased to be depressed on the scanner of Apple iPhones."

It's widely accepted nowadays, then, when a person dies, they may specify to be (or not to be) an organ donor, to be cremated or buried, or even to be wrapped in bedsheets and unexamined. Perhaps now is an era calling for the need of overly specific privacy and security instructions, including no posthumous fingerprinting, no unlocking of private folders, or even "bury me with my phone."


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday December 28 2018, @01:01AM

    by Arik (4543) on Friday December 28 2018, @01:01AM (#779178) Journal
    Well, yes, it is legal, if the party responsible for the property invited them onto it, and invited them to play with the corpse, then I guess the police did nothing wrong!

    Sue the ignorant SOB running that Funeral Home for every penny he's ever made and every penny he's ever likely to make, plus attorney's fees. Absolute negligence on his part not telling the cops 'no.' It's a single syllable, it's not so much to ask for.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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