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Feds Can't Force You To Unlock Your iPhone With Finger Or Face, Judge Rules
A California judge has ruled that American cops can't force people to unlock a mobile phone with their face or finger. The ruling goes further to protect people's private lives from government searches than any before and is being hailed as a potentially landmark decision.
[...] But in a more significant part of the ruling, Judge Westmore declared that the government did not have the right, even with a warrant, to force suspects to incriminate themselves by unlocking their devices with their biological features. Previously, courts had decided biometric features, unlike passcodes, were not "testimonial." That was because a suspect would have to willingly and verbally give up a passcode, which is not the case with biometrics. A password was therefore deemed testimony, but body parts were not, and so not granted Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.
That created a paradox: How could a passcode be treated differently to a finger or face, when any of the three could be used to unlock a device and expose a user's private life?
And that's just what Westmore focused on in her ruling. Declaring that "technology is outpacing the law," the judge wrote that fingerprints and face scans were not the same as "physical evidence" when considered in a context where those body features would be used to unlock a phone.
[...] There were other ways the government could get access to relevant data in the Facebook extortion case "that do not trample on the Fifth Amendment," Westmore added. They could, for instance, ask Facebook to provide Messenger communications, she suggested. Facebook has been willing to hand over such messages in a significant number of previous cases Forbes has reviewed.
[...] Andrew Crocker, senior staff attorney at the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the latest California ruling went a step further than he'd seen other courts go. In particular, Westmore observed alphanumeric passcodes and biometrics served the same purpose in unlocking phones.
[...] The magistrate judge decision could, of course, be overturned by a district court judge, as happened in Illinois in 2017 with a similar ruling. The best advice for anyone concerned about government overreach into their smartphones: Stick to a strong alphanumeric passcode that you won't be compelled to disclose.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:22PM
Suppose it's not his meat locker? The fact that he is able to open the meat locker which supposedly doesn't belong to him can be used as evidence against him. Now, the real purpose of the Fifth Amendment is to protect the innocent not the guilty. So back to your hypothetical example, what happens if the "evil mobster" is a framed innocent man, the "fall guy"? The police or courts compel him to open the meat locker, say with a threat that he'll stay in prison until he does, and then some corrupt police officer gets the combination from the real mobster and feeds it to the fall guy. Now, they can claim that because the innocent man had the combination to the meat locker, then he must have been responsible for killing whoever was inside. The fall guy takes the fall.