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posted by martyb on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the 12345 dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:24AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:24AM (#1012303)

    If you confess, the Lord will go easier on you. Have you not read Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"? Made the point that several times, during the pouring of molten lead into wounds, cutting out of the tongue, and everyone's favorite, the drawing and quartering, they would pause to ask the condemned if he repented, to save his immortal soul. So nice of them, really.

    Starting Score:    0  points
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @05:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @05:32AM (#1012313)

    > Have you not read Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"?

    Spoiler alert: Punish is better.