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Judge Rules Against Forced Fingerprinting (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: A federal judge in Chicago has ruled against a government request which would require forced fingerprinting of private citizens in order to open a secure, personal phone or tablet. In the ruling, the judge stated that while fingerprints in and of themselves are not protected, the government's method of obtaining the fingerprints would violate the Fourth and Fifth amendments. The government's request was given as part of a search warrant related to a child pornography ring. The court ruled that the government could seize devices, but that it could not compel people physically present at the time of seizure to provide their fingerprints "onto the Touch ID sensor of any Apple iPhone, iPad, or other Apple brand device in order to gain access to the contents of any such device." The report mentions that the ruling was based on three separate arguments. "The first was that the boilerplate language used in the request was dated, and did not, for example, address vulnerabilities associated with wireless services. Second, the court said that the context in which the fingerprints were intended to be gathered may violate the Fourth Amendment search and seizure rights of the building residents and their visitors, all of whom would have been compelled to provide their fingerprints to open their secure devices. Finally, the court noted that historically the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination, does not allow a person to circumvent the fingerprinting process." You can read more about the ruling via Ars Technica.
Also, doesn't this amount to forcing people to provide evidence that can potentially incriminate them?
Just to get the clear... government can't finger print you if your evolved in a child pornography ring as it's a violation of your Fourth and Fifth amendments --- but if you want to exercise your 2nd amendment then you have to give up your 4th and 5th...
Disney and Universal collect your fingerprints and no one ever objects to it.
Don't read this story as a ruling against the police / government being allowed to compel individuals suspected of criminal activity to be forced to give fingerprints. That is not what's at issue here, and the decision doesn't affect that.
This story is that the wholesale screening of individuals that the police have no otherwise suspicion of a crime, shotgun style, is being ruled against. Just like the case several years ago when police sought to have an entire small town's male population give DNA samples to match some evidence they had of a sex crime. The judge in this case tossed out the willy nilly use of police power to compel people wholly unrelated to the issue, not under suspicion at all, from having to give evidence.
When you're suspected of something specifically, you can definitely still be compelled. Just like being compelled to give a breathalyzer, or DNA when a court orders you to.
But as a more practical matter anyway, 10 tries of different people's fingerprints, and the phone will be wiped regardless... so there's a limit to how useful the technique would've been to begin with.
Finally, the court noted that historically the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination, does not allow a person to circumvent the fingerprinting process.
I'm confused. I was expecting the "three separate arguments" to all be reasons against the taking of fingerprints. But this sounds like he's saying that a person cannot plead the fifth in order to avoid having their fingerprints taken? So it's an argument for the government's request?
are totally secure devices. What I mean by that is that more 3 attempts to guess the lock code or opening the case of the device deletes all data and restores the device to factory default contents. All ports on said device would be totally deactivated in its locked state.
We can't count on legislatures to do the right thing and pass laws forbidding ANY unauthorized persons (including police, CIA, FBI, NSA, and any local, county, state or federal agency or member of such) to access any private citizen's devices without that person's express and unforced written permission. And even if they would pass such laws, those laws would be ignored.
So what we need are devices that cannot be broken into without erasing any data that they contain.
It's our greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time. "We test our limits. We face our fears. We rise to the challenge."
However, laws and constitutional amendments are, obviously, limits. Given the Attitude cited in the title, those subject to them come to see them not as protections but as barriers to achievement.
To paraphrase Dartagnan in the movie "The Three Musketeers: "They are ... inconvenient."
So if you have a Samsung ( for example ) you are fucked.
and the judge saw right through it. What worries me is if we keep putting folks like Trump in charge of the Executive and he stacks the courts with folks who will ignore the rule of law. They're already forming a new court to get around the more liberal ones that run out of California...
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Yes, I read the judgement and the court wrote that there is a fifth amendment concern. Specifically, the judge pointed to another major ruling recently that by unlocking a phone via a password (or fingerprint), the person is effectively testifying that it is their phone, under their control, and they can decrypt and encrypt it.
Also, the application for the warrant was deficient on traditional fourth amendment grounds, specificity of what and who would be searched, and what the police expected to find where. They wanted to use the fingers of everyone present at the house (resident or *visitor*) to search every electronic device in the house. So a delivery man dropping off a couch at the time would have his phone searched.
The judge indicated that the police needed to be more specific. Something like "we want to search Bob Smith's Galaxy S5 for a file called 12yroldfuck.mpg because we believe he downloaded that file to that phone on February 12th, based on [evidence]." That would solve both the 4th amendment specificity issue and the 5th amendment issue - if the police already know that the Galaxy S5 is Bob's, the act of him unlocking it doesn't provide new, testimonial information.
I think what the summary was trying to hint at is that the ruling doesn't prohibit the normal process of taking fingerprints incident to arrest.
Let's say police can compel everyone to swipe their fingerprint on the phone. If it unlocks , they are the owner ... ok, now pick the victim , plant the special phone that has child porn on it and is programmed to take the "next" fingerprint swiped and store it as authorized user so that when the "test" is repeated with other innocent people it will deny access. Victim swipes next. Now they are ready to put on a show in court giving the appearance that the victim really is the owner to uneducated audience.
The rational and intelligent states of Illinois, California, and New York are doing what they can to limit the federal insanity. Please give them whatever support you can.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
is packed with right wing idealogs like Thomas who couldn't give a nun's left bollock (yes, I meant to write that, think about it) about rule of law. And wasn't that my whole point and look I've gone cross eye now >--...
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DON'T use your fucking fingerprints as the keys to any device you own.
What this is really about: Can the government demand that you take some action? It doesn't matter whether this is a matter of seconds, hours, or months: Are you the government's slave, to command as it wishes?
If it were just about fingerprints, then the government could collect your fingerprint from something you touched, reproduce it on an artificial fingertip, and unlock the phone*. There is nothing at all stopping them from doing this, but that's not the precedent that they want to set.
*This isn't even particularly difficult. A German computer magazine (c't) did a demo of this back in 2004, using glue and other ordinary household stuff. No link, because the article is no longer online, but a google search turns up lots of similar results.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You mean states whose political officials get arrested on corruption charges by the feds? How does that limit federal insanity, when the states themselves are insane?
How is this different than looking at my face?
Do you need a warrant to take my picture?
That can be incriminating. I just don't get it.
Sure, if you have my prints, you could plant them at a crime scene. (Difficulty level = High).
But if you have my photo, you can fabricate "witnesses" that say I did something. (Difficulty level = Low).
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
It seems to me that whenever the government wants to secure for itself any kind of expanded power, the test case revolves around terrorism or child pornography. This tends to make people more sympathetic to the government's case.
Besides, here's what I was actually replying to:
If only a very small number of arrested suspects plead not guilty and have their case go the a jury trial then the cop is doing quite well are they not?
Also plenty of people are arrested on suspicion and released without ever going to trial after questioning or evidence shows that they are not guilty - nothing wrong with that, it's a process not instant magic.
To sum up the analogy is really pretty stupid when you think about it. The complaint about the reality it's being compared to probably even more so. Emotive bullshit being applied to attempt to smear a very conservative error checking system that is working precisely as designed.
Shut up, you pedophile.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Seems like the founder already took care of this one. Many rights exist that are not specifically enumerated in the constitution and the courts are free to find those right violated. Unfortunately strict originalists like Scalia forget about the Ninth Amendment when they want to go back to what "The drafters of the Constitution wrote down" as their primary source for rulings. The Ninth basically says there is a lot of rights that we the founders haven't written down but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Oh, looks like I hit a nerve.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.