The Government Wants Your Fingerprint To Unlock Phones (dailygazette.com)

schwit1 quotes this report from the Daily Gazette: "As the world watched the FBI spar with Apple this winter in an attempt to hack into a San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, federal officials were quietly waging a different encryption battle in a Los Angeles courtroom. There, authorities obtained a search warrant compelling the girlfriend of an alleged Armenian gang member to press her finger against an iPhone that had been seized from a Glendale home. The phone contained Apple's fingerprint identification system for unlocking, and prosecutors wanted access to the data inside it.

It marked a rare time that prosecutors have demanded a person provide a fingerprint to open a computer, but experts expect such cases to become more common as cracking digital security becomes a larger part of law enforcement work. The Glendale case and others like it are forcing courts to address a basic question: How far can the government go to obtain biometric markers such as fingerprints and hair?"

Comments

Re:Fingerprinting is new?

[Antique Geekmeister]

And the police fingerprints are still good enough to be used to defeat the best fingerprint scanners. There's been no noticeable improvement in the technology since the paper on defeating it was published in 2002.

                https://cryptome.org/gummy.htm

The crack was confirmed by MythBusters in 2011.

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There has been no basic change in the technology. Fingerprint scanners are still trivially beaten.

Re: Duress print

[AK Marc]

Converting the data to an unusable form would be treated like shredding, which is illegal, and well tested to be illegal, if you do so after you know the material shredded was needed for an investigation or lawsuit.

Re:How far can the (US) government go?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have a bit of a misinterpretation of the fifth amendment.

The explicit text related to self-incrimination is:

"...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself; ..."

which is generally interpreted as:

"The Fifth Amendment protects criminal defendants from having to testify if they may incriminate themselves through the testimony. A witness may 'plead the Fifth' and not answer if the witness believes answering the question may be self-incriminatory."

So, the fifth amendment specifically applies to testimony.

So while you can't be compelled to provide authorities with your decryption key for instance, we have recently seen here that you can be ordered to perform the decryption itself and be held in contempt of court for not doing so.

Depends on if they can prove it's yours

[raymorris]

In at least one well-known case, it was held that a subpoena for the contents of a phone (protected by a password) to be used or provided depends on one factual question. The same question that applies to documents locked in an old-fashioned safe that has a combination.

If there is a question about whether or not the phone belongs to the defendant, providing the password would be admitting ownership. That would be testimony, which is protected by the 5th.

On the other hand, if the defendant admits it's his phone (or safe) , they have no 5th amendment right to interfere with a lawful subpoena just because unlocking the documents requires a combination that they know in their head, rather than one they wrote down.

Re: Duress print

[TheCarp]

> if you do so after you know the material shredded was needed for an investigation or lawsuit.

This. As a budding young sysadmin this was always one of the first things that came up as why we really need a data retention policy. The last position you want to be in when a lawsuit arrives is having just erased data with no clear policy as to why you did it.

Its not even entirely about whats true or what can be discovered but what can be proven to the satisfaction of men, and that is always going to be a larger set. Best to have a policy and stick to it.