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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.
"Social Media stars" (whatever the fuck they are), and would like to see them all put in prison on charges of assisting cultural suicide, no one should be compelled to give up evidence that incriminates themselves, ever. It's a basic right. Rights aren't granted by the government, but you wouldn't know it from how out of fucking control they are these days.
If courts can authorize the search on a device but it is technically impossible because the suspect can't be compelled to unlock the security than it only strengthens the law-enforcement case that they need legislation mandating a back-door into devices. One that can be abused without your knowledge or consent of courts
This isn't the first case of this. Nothing is going to happen any time soon.
The others are slowly working their way to the Supreme Court.
Until the Supreme Court rules nothing is going to happen.
They're welcome to saw my phone in half to get at the files on the flash chip too :)
I get the point you're making about discovery, but this *still* violates being a witness against yourself. In discovery the police/DA can't put a piece of paper and a pen in front of you and require you write a confession, even if you were caught red handed.
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might as well compel a confession and be done with it faster.
Take the exact same case, but replace the phone with a safe, and the PIN with the combination to the safe's lock. In this instance, the 5th Amendment absolutely protects from being compelled to unlock the safe or provide the combination to open the lock. Now having said that if the police have a warrant for the contents of the safe because there is reasonable suspicion evidence pertaining to the investigation is contained within, they are absolutely free to seize the safe and attempt to open it via other means (locksmith/physically cutting/breaking the safe open/etc). In the same manner, if the police have a warrant for the contents of the phone's memory in this case, they are within their rights to attempt to guess the PIN or break the encryption on the phone. You could argue that's much harder than breaking into a physical safe - and that is usually the case - but frankly that's not the defendant's problem. Just because it's hard for the police to obtain potentially incriminating evidence does not compel one to surrender it. This is a flagrant violation of the 5th Amendment, and I cannot believe courts continue to skirt such a fundamental part of our legal system because police are throwing a fit about encryption being unfair.
Right. A case about two idiots blackmailing a woman with nudes is the thing that would upset the founding fathers.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencken
The mass surveillance over the US population conducted by the federal government over the last decade was a-ok ...
You are implying that supporters of human rights are hypocrites. I don't think so. Those of us objecting to this violation of 5th are the same people that objected to the mass surveillance.
All Americans have the legal right to remain silent at all times, and guilt can never be inferred based on the execution of that right.
Honestly, that's all that needs to be said here.
The constitution is razor sharp on this issue. You cannot ever be compelled to say anything in your defense, whether it's a password, a location, a date, an apology, the number of languages you speak, or your favorite color.
Any ruling that a defendant must "speak up" to prove their innocence is unconstitutional.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I think this case would be a very poor test of Fifth Amendment protections, seeing as the defendants already outed themselves with their extortion attempt, and the evidence the prosecution have (mainly what the blackmailers communicated to the victim) pretty much guarantees that some or all of their electronic devices have incriminating files on them. This isn't a case of a fishing expedition, the prosecution knows where the fish is, it just doesn't have a hook to catch them with.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Abuse #1: Judge can hold you in contempt, in jail, essentially forever, for honestly forgetting phone password
Abuse #2: Cops replace your phone with different phone of same model. Use (very likely) different pin. Now, even if you recall the pin, you cannot unlock the phone. In jail for contempt indefinitely.
Abuse #3: Judge believes the phone is yours. You state it isn't. Court compels you to unlock the phone because "clearly" it must be yours. You cannot/do not. Jail.
There are clearly more ways this can be abused. This should be sufficient. You should never be required to divulge the contents of your mind because there is no way to verify if you are lying, or don't have it, or cannot remember it. Thus, in cases such as this, the punishment happens even if you're innocent.
what's to stop the authorities from planting evidence on the phones? Yes, I know that's unlikely in this case - but entirely aside from the constitutional violation, this precedent just begs to be misused by LEO's, many of whom would much rather chalk up a 'win' at the expense of innocent citizens than invest the time and sweat required to either uncover the truth or determine that they can't do so. This is a really BAD idea.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Blame the gradual erasure of search and seizure on the decades long drug war. That's what's caused the erosion of civil liberties, not Trump's one appointment (who hasn't really ruled on anything) or potential future nominee for the court.
People aren't getting raked over the coals for their private information just recently, it's been going on for decades as law enforcement, district attorneys and their political supporters have green lighted aggressive drug searches which have given the courts many opportunities to rule in favor of the police, like rain eroding a sand castle.
IMHO, our protections from search and seizure are all but gone. Civil forfeiture is still alive and well, for crying out loud. The NSA hoovers our data, local police use Stingrays, etc.
No Supreme Court appointments by any party are going to change any of this, they're mostly just reinforcing 50 years of progressively worse precedence.
The problem with "You have to give us your password/PIN/combo/whatever or be in contempt and go to jail," is that even if you are ok with any constitutional issues (or perhaps are from a country without such protections), it is still open to a big issue: What happens when someone forgets? People forget their passwords ALL the time. Anyone who's worked in IT can tell you and yes, this includes things like phone PINs. Problem is with a law like this, you can go to jail, forever. The police demand access to something of yours that is encrypted, you can't remember the password, you get thrown in jail until you give it up. Since you legitimately can't remember, that is the rest of your life.
This gets even more problematic when you consider that good encryption looks just like randomness, and good stenography is undetectable. So a random bit of data in a deleted area on the harddrive: Hidden encrypted data, or just leftover garbage from something the system did? All those high res photos of random shit nobody cares about: Just your hobby and data hoarding, or used to hide encrypted stego data? There is literally no way to prove which, presuming that it was done right. So if the police can say "Decrypt this or else," and it isn't actually anything encrypted, or at least not something you have the key to, then there's a real problem.
Except if a Judge decides he doesn't give a fuck,
Then that sucks. In the case you linked to though, it seems there was good reason for him to be in contempt:
The problem is that it doesn't matter what it looks like. You're not supposed to ever be jailed without a trail, and especially without any possibility for a trail, nor for a completely arbitrary and indefinite amount of time.
Let that sink in: If the judge believes you're lying, then whether or not you are, you can be jailed effectively forever, completely without a trial. The only way to even get a trial is to admit you committed perjury - that is about as clear a case of coerced self-incrimination as I can think of, and precisely what the 5th Amendment is supposed to protect you from. And, if you are actually telling the truth, it is impossible for you to ever prove it, as you will never get a trial at which to do so.
I absolutely agree that backdoors are a terrible idea. But what happened here however was perfectly fine to my mind. The police already had strong evidence linking the suspects to a crime, the evidence was reviewed by a court - and the suspects were only compelled to give up their passcodes after a judge, in a public and open court, determined there was genuine probable cause.
That's exactly how it's SUPPOSED to work.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Is it speech ?
It's speech. Compelling me to say one thing (password) means they can compel me to say anything, in which case why don't they simply compel me to confess and get it over with - no need for the password.
Or is it "Here's a search warrant, unlock the damn door".
It's not. It's "Here's a search warrant, now tell us the contents of your mind."
If you really want to get finicky then the order can be changed to force him to enter the passcode himself and, under supervision by an oficer of the court, disable it - and he never has to reveal it.
It's not speech, it's a key - a judge has every right to compel you to hand over the key to private property when a duly justified search warrant is issued pursuant to probable cause.
Many things are not one or the other but a mixture of both - the password which you call a key is also my private thoughts. If the key conflicts with my right to private thoughts, which should win? Should we take away private thoughts?
"You must say what the state tells you to say" is something out of a 1984 dystopia. "You must say what the state tells you to say" is thought-crime.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It's compelled speech. It's not the responsibility of the accused to provide access to incriminating evidence. On the contrary, he has a legal right to avoid self incrimination.
A warrant provides authorization for the government to look for something; it's not a guarantee that they can access it or find it. This is no different from "tell us where the bodies are." Sure, a guilty suspect can cooperate (but, crucially, an innocent suspect cannot), but that does not mean he must, or that non-cooperation can be used against him.
Many judges seem to have lost their appreciation for the rights of the accused. That's understandable when confronted with a never ending stream of clearly guilty people, but it's not in keeping with the values we claim to hold.
I actually have no problem at all with the government trying to get the information, heck even compelling a third party to crack the phone. I do have a problem with them compelling someone to provide information against themselves or provide information they could have forgotten.