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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by shortscreen on Thursday June 25 2020, @05:57AM (1 child)
Hubbell argued that he had been compelled to incriminate himself because he was essentially forced to demonstrate his own knowledge of the requested documents in order to comply with the request. (And the court agreed.)
The author of TFA suggests that unlocking a phone is closer to the strongbox analogy, where information resulting from a subsequent search by police is considered to stand on its own rather than being something that came from the defendant's testimony.
So there is a question as to whether data on a phone or the passcode itself count as testimony. It's interesting to reference this older article: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-02-mn-18241-story.html [latimes.com]
Asking for a passcode is not oral testimony?
But the Indiana ruling also compared it to a fishing expedition. The cops apparently couldn't say what they expected to find on the phone. They just wanted to look. It sounds to me like their case must be pretty weak, if after attempting to gather evidence from the alleged stalking victim and various third parties (eg. the phone company or a social media site) they still couldn't describe how picking through the defendant's phone would prove guilt.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Friday June 26 2020, @02:09PM
No, reread your own comment.
"where information resulting from a subsequent search by police is considered to stand on its own rather than being something that came from the defendant's testimony."
Information stored on a smartphone stands on its own. The court does not require oral testimony, they just require the password to acquire the evidence. The password never needs to see the inside of a courtroom. The data stored on a phone is not an opinion that rides on the reliability of the defendant unless it is his personal diary they are reading.
data being electronic does not make it opinion based.
That said, he has a case if they try to use his knowledge of the password against him in court. But if they already know it is his phone/file and they just need to get into it. The law is pretty cut and dry.