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Florida Court Says Suspected Voyeur Must Reveal His iPhone Passcode To Police (bbc.com)
A Florida appeals court has reversed a decision by a previous judge and ruled that a suspected voyeur can be made to reveal his iPhone passcode to police. "The defendant was arrested after a woman out shopping saw a man crouch down and aim what she believed was a smartphone under her skirt," reports BBC: Store CCTV captured footage of a man crouched down, holding an illuminated device and moving it towards the victim's skirt, according to court documents published by news site Courthouse News. Aaron Stahl was identified by law enforcement officers who reviewed the footage, according to court documents. After his arrest, Mr Stahl initially agreed to allow officers to search his iPhone 5, which he told them was at his home. However, once it had been retrieved by police - but before he had revealed his passcode - he withdrew consent to the search. The trial court had decided that Mr Stahl could be protected by the Fifth Amendment, which is designed to prevent self-incrimination. However, Judge Anthony Black's formal opinion to the court quashed the decision. Judge Black referred to a famous Supreme Court case, Doe v US 1988, in which Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that a defendant could be made to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents but they could not "be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe." "We question whether identifying the key which will open the strongbox - such that the key is surrendered - is, in fact, distinct from telling an officer the combination," wrote Judge Black. "More importantly, we question the continuing viability of any distinction as technology advances."
Some one can make a lot of money by setting up an secret sharing service so that you do not actually know your password.
The company would be owned and operated offshore in many countries some of which will not honor US warrants.
When you start the service a strong password would be setup using the technique of cryptographic secret sharing, so that the password is split on servers in many countries many of which do not honor US warrants.
You also have a authentication password totally controlled by you that proves that you are you.
When you want to use your password, you send a authenticated message to the servers, and your password is reassembled from the parts using encrypted communications by a computer program, so that you never see the password. You could have redundancy so that sabotage at one server would not cause it to break. You could set it up so that it takes M out of N servers to cooperate to get your password, where M is less than N. You could also mix in yourself in the sharing algorithm so that you have one small piece of the password so that the servers can not reconstruct the real password without your help. But your piece would not be enough to reconstruct the real password. Thus, the servers could not pretend to do something without your consent.
When you are detained, your lawyer causes a delay. (Any Lawyer who can not cause a delay is incompetent.) During the delay, a canary tells the servers that you are being coerced, and the servers stop cooperating until you can prove that you are free again.
Use defensive formulation! You bought the service because you were afraid of being coerced by criminals and foreign governments, not because you wanted to evade US laws!
In any case you never had the password.