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Court Rules In 'Sextortion' Case That Phone PINs Are Not Protected By Fifth Amendment (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Can authorities access potentially incriminating information on your phone by compelling you to reveal your passcode? Or is access to your phone's secrets protected under the Constitution? The answer, at least in an extortion case involving bikini-clad models, social media celebrities and racy images, is that phone passcodes are not protected, a judge ruled Wednesday. The case stems from the arrest of Hencha Voigt, 29, and her then-boyfriend, Wesley Victor, 34, last July on charges of extortion. Voigt and Victor threatened to release sexually explicit videos and photos of social media star "YesJulz," whose real name is Julienna Goddard, unless she paid them off, according to a Miami Police Department report. Both Voigt and "YesJulz" are big names on social media. Voigt is a fitness model and Instagram celebrity who starred last fall on "WAGS Miami," an E! reality TV show about the wives and girlfriends of sports figures in South Beach. As part of the ongoing investigation into the case, prosecutors have sought to search Voigt's and Victor's phones and asked a judge to order the two to give up their phone passcodes. Prosecutors have obtained the text messages sent to Goddard, but they have been unable to bypass the passcodes on the suspects' phones -- Voigt's iPhone and Victor's BlackBerry -- to search for more evidence. As such, prosecutors filed a motion asking a circuit court judge to compel the defendants to give their passwords to authorities. A judge on Wednesday ruled on behalf of prosecutors and ordered Voigt and Victor to give up their phone passwords, according to Bozanic, Victor's attorney.
What're they gonna do - torture them for the info?
No, but they can be held in jail indefinitely for refusing to obey the judge's order.
Legally, rights are just limits on government power. They are granted by the Constitution, which is kind of the government. Your rights are not guaranteed freedoms, rather freedom is implied within the scope of the limits that your rights represent to legislative overreach.
You're exactly, 100%, fucking wrong and retarded.
You've missed the entire fucking point of the declaration and the constitution and its amendments. Rights and freedoms are not granted by the government, they are natural and inalienable, with very fucking explicit language stating that the government has no business restricting said rights.
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Passwords/passcodes are not protected under the First Amendment, they are not considered speech. They may be protected, as a key on a keyring, under the Fourth or Firth Amendments. But those same amendments provide for a legally obtained warrant, if there is enough verified evidence in support of probably cause, to legally justify such a warrant.
If it's a legally obtained warrant, based upon valid proof of probably cause, negating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as the Constitution does provide for a legally obtained warrant.
Calling it speech is just a way to try to muddy the waters and make the issue unclear to the masses, in the hope of getting support from those who have never read the Constitution or researched the legal precedents regarding these issues.