Feds Walk Into a Building, Demand Everyone's Fingerprints To Open Phones (dailyherald.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the Daily Herald: Investigators in Lancaster, California, were granted a search warrant last May with a scope that allowed them to force anyone inside the premises at the time of search to open up their phones via fingerprint recognition, Forbes reported Sunday. The government argued that this did not violate the citizens' Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination because no actual passcode was handed over to authorities...

"I was frankly a bit shocked," said Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, when he learned about the scope of search warrant. "As far as I know, this warrant application was unprecedented"... He also described requiring phones to be unlocked via fingerprint, which does not technically count as handing over a self-incriminating password, as a "clever end-run" around constitutional rights.

Comments

I tell them that I use wanker auth

[Anonymous Coward]

and say they need to suck it for the phone to unlock

Re: I tell them that I use wanker auth

[BlytheBowman]

I wouldn't be suprised if some men (circumsised with dry penis heads) do just that, as there are crease patterns all over it's dome

Re: I tell them that I use wanker auth

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that apostrophe in the possessive pronoun that turned it into the contraction for "it is"?

Samsung

[Roger W Moore]

Phones need a panic button. Say tap the power button three times quickly and it goes into a locked down mode...

Samsung have a tablet that can go one better than that: it destroys all the data and the device itself if you do that.