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In August last year, the AFP obtained a warrant under section 3LA of the Crimes Act to unlock a gold-coloured Samsung phone found in the centre console of the man’s car when he was pulled over and searched.
The man supplied the password for a laptop also in the car, and a second phone did not have a pin to unlock, but when asked about the gold phone, he answered “no comment” and would not provide a password for the phone.
He later claimed it wasn’t his phone and he didn’t know the password to access it.
The federal court last month overturned the magistrate’s decision to grant a warrant forcing the man to provide assistance in unlocking the phone.
The decision was overturned on several grounds, notably judge Richard White found that the Samsung phone was not a computer or data storage device as defined by the federal Crimes Act.
The law does not define a computer, but defines data storage devices as a “thing containing, or designed to contain, data for use by a computer”.
White found that the phone could not be defined as a computer or data storage device.
“While a mobile phone may have the capacity to ‘perform mathematical computations electronically according to a series of stored instructions called a program’, it does not seem apt to call such an item a computer,” he said.
“Mobile phones are primarily devices for communicating although it is now commonplace for them to have a number of other functions ... Again, the very ubiquity of mobile phones suggests that, if the parliament had intended that they should be encompassed by the term ‘computer’ it would have been obvious to say so.”
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 20 2019, @06:59PM (1 child)
This is just another example of using convoluted reasoning to get to where you want to go. Luckily this time, those convolutions were used to support privacy, but nonetheless, much of the legal reasoning involved in cases is derived from what outcome one desires and most often, that reasoning is used violate privacy (for example, almost the entirety of the law surrounding the 4A since the start of the drug war).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pipedwho on Tuesday August 20 2019, @10:15PM
Not convoluted reasoning at all. The legally accepted concept of how a computer was used and therefore how it is defined in a legal sense is fixed when the law is made. Allowing it to change dramatically when applying said law opens laws to application that were not originally possible and therefore could never have been intended.
In this case the broadening of the usage cases of a ‘computer’ have no bearing on the law as written and must either be clarified with a new or amended law. Or the narrowest available definition accepted. Anything else and the legal system becomes open to any number of ambiguous and contradictory interpretations for nearly anything defined in law.
It only seems convoluted from a layman’s point of view when considering a particular technical definition. A technical definition that would cause this law to supersede and contradict laws pertaining to functionality of a smartphone covered by other laws: telephone equipment, tracking devices, and other expanded functionality.