Man Sentenced To 180 Days In Jail For Refusing To Give Police His iPhone Passcode (miamiherald.com) 234
schwit1 quotes a report from Miami Herald: A Hollywood man must serve 180 days in jail for refusing to give up his iPhone password to police, a Broward judge ruled Tuesday -- the latest salvo in intensifying legal battles over law-enforcement access to smartphones. Christopher Wheeler, 41, was taken into custody in a Broward Circuit Court, insisting he had already provided the pass code to police investigating him for child abuse, although the number did not work. "I swear, under oath, I've given them the password," a distraught Wheeler, his hands handcuffed behind his back, told Circuit Judge Michael Rothschild, who earlier in May found the man guilty of contempt of court. As Wheeler was jailed Tuesday, the same issue was unfolding in Miami-Dade for a man accused of extorting a social-media celebrity over stolen sex videos. That man, Wesley Victor, and his girlfriend had been ordered by a judge to produce a passcode to phones suspected of containing text messages showing their collusion in an extortion plot. Victor claimed he didn't remember the number. He prevailed. On Tuesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Charles Johnson ruled that there was no way to prove that Victor actually remembered his passcode, more than 10 months after his initial arrest. Johnson declined to hold the man in contempt of court. Wheeler will eventually be allowed to post bond pending an appeal. If he gives up a working pass code, he'll be allowed out of jail, Judge Rothschild told him.
Confusing (Score:5, Informative)
The snippet above doesn't make clear that the article discussed two different cases. In one case, the guy got 180 days. In the other case, the court let the guy off because the police couldn't prove that he remembered the code 10 months later.
Re:Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
These "judges" are criminals themselves and should be thrown in jail for violating this man's human rights.
History will judge these fools the same way as the inquisitors who tortured heretics to extract a confession. This is basically the same. Putting an innocent man (until proven guilty) in jail because he refuses to cooperate with the inquisition. And of course they create a precedent like this with a case involving children, so the public backlash would be limited. Where are alt-right patriots when you need them?
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The 5th amendment gives you the right to not testify and provide proof of your own guilt through direct testimony. It doesn't give you the right to hide evidence. A more apt metaphor might be refusing to provide access to a safety deposit box, or open a home safe. Both of those can be physically forced with the right tools and a court order. If you are foolish enough to keep copious notes proving your own guilt and the prosecution can prove their existence or acquire them that is not a 5th amendment issue,
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A better analogy would be being put in jail for not providing the location of a safety deposit box that contains proof of your guilt. Assuming that the prosecutor has proof that such a thing exists, but not the location, do you think it alright under the 5th amendment for the government to punish you for not providing the location?
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More to the point, imagine you have a floor safe in your home, it is found during a lawful search, can you refuse to open it?
And if the authorities do force it open, and that triggers the destruction of the contents, are you guilty of destroying evidence? OR something else?
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For the second question, no idea.
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The safety box analogy is terrible for both ways of the argument. An encryption password isn't locking anything, the physical support is accessible with a screw driver. For the model to be valid you'd need and "ideal unbreakable safety box", why would you bother to base doctrine on an empty shell when we have concrete
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If the prosecutor can prove that a safety box exists that contains proof of your guilt, they can prove you are guilty without the contents and thus do not need them.
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I'd imagine there are cases where you can prove the existence of the box, but not the underlying crime. For instance, suppose they found a key to a safe deposit box (in an unknown location) with a trace amount of cocaine on it. That would be evidence of a safety deposit box that had drugs in it. But, by itself, would only be prosecutable for the trace amount. Which could be a different crime, based on the quantity.
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The 5th amendment gives you the right to not testify and provide proof of your own guilt through direct testimony.
The Fifth Amendment gives you the right not to be compelled to testify against yourself, or to quote it, for one "to be a witness against himself". Note the wording. You can be compelled to testify, just not as a witness against yourself. What is well established in precedent is this means you cannot be forced to provide testimony that would prove your guilt, but you can be forced to testify about facts not in dispute, like the combination to the safe in your home that p
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The article was, clear, he claimed to have provided a passcode but that passcode did not work, whose fault, the people who held the device broke it trying to hack it, Apple's code failed for some reason, Apples hardware failed for some reason, or he lied, if you can not prove which is true, by law, reasonable doubt exists. Where under law, is a consumer required to warrant the functioning of a device they bought, to the point of criminal prosecution, when the manufacturer does not and writes some of the cra
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It most definitely is a 5th Amendment issue. It requires compelling me to reveal something that only exists in my mind. The Key analogy only goes so far, and in this situation it fails.
Re: Confusing (Score:2)
Yes Mr officer, I would love to help you but that document is just results of a random number generator in base64 that I was using to run a Monte Carlo simulation by hand.
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Gizmodo actually posted a much more informative story than slashdot. The 5th amendment issue is summarized thus:
http://gizmodo.com/can-we-plea... [gizmodo.com]
"Legally speaking, phone unlocking is a very challenging question—that’s the problem. On the one hand, American citizens can’t be forced to testify against themselves according to the Fifth Amendment. This is the reasoning many defense attorneys use when prosecutors try to force suspects to unlock their iPhones. On the other hand, police and prose
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The Alt-Right's just full of rage (Score:2)
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Look, it makes for an easier prosecution if people believe they have rights that they do not, in fact, have.
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These judges should go back to law school and read about the 5th, and why it exists.
And you should go to law school in the first place. Giving up a password is not testifying against yourself. The password is not evidence. The password is a means to access evidence that you have no right to hide.
(There is a tiny minority of cases where giving the password _would_ be testifying yourself; that is in cases where it is not sure that you are the owner of the device and giving the password clearly proves that you are. )
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A modern day criminal trial is already very uneven with the prosecutor having massive amounts of resources, where a suspect has very limited resources.
Good.
History will judge these fools the same way as the inquisitors who tortured heretics to extract a confession.
There's a reason why torture isn't permitted and it has nothing to with the reason why the 5th is somewhat silly in this regard. Torture leads to admission of guilt for the purposes of avoiding torture. It has nothing to do with the guilt itself. Handing over data on the other hand is little more than evidence. Data doesn't crack under pressure and as long as it isn't used for a fishing expedition not related to the case at hand there's no reason files on your phone are any different to letters in your
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History will judge these fools the same way as the inquisitors who tortured heretics to extract a confession. This is basically the same. Putting an innocent man (until proven guilty) in jail because he refuses to cooperate with the inquisition. And of course they create a precedent like this with a case involving children, so the public backlash would be limited. Where are alt-right patriots when you need them?
The so-called "Alt-Right" are in favour of this. Fascism and police states are the love child of authoritarianism the far right. If Trump could take them out of the human rights accords they would welcome it. The irony is, most "Alt-Right" dont realise that they need those rights until its too late.
Now I'd rather not wait for history to judge these fools, first because history works too slowly and secondly because history is written by the victors. If we don't oppose "alt-right" there is a chance they mi
Re: Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue then becomes, what do you do when you actually do not remember the passcode?
How do I prove my innocence in "refusing" to provide the code?
The issue now becomes an unattainable burden of proof on the defendant, who is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, no?
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If you have some encrypted file on your hard drive that was created a decade ago, you may have reasonably forgotten the password to decrypt that file.
On the other hand, we have people with smartphones---that they used every day for months---who suddenly "forgot" the password/pattern when they were taken into custody. The police are asking them to do something they have literally done hundreds (or even thousands) of times before.
It is almost inconceivable that these people honestly forgot their passwords. He
Re: Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
As we know from the San Bernardino case, it is not an "unbreakable lock". The government just finds it cheaper to throw a man in jail than pay someone to open the iphone.
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Maybe because officially the phone company doesn't store the actual messages?
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As we know from the San Bernardino case, it is not an "unbreakable lock". The government just finds it cheaper to throw a man in jail than pay someone to open the iphone.
An old iPhone 5c with a four digit passcode apparently doesn't have an "unbreakable lock". Newer iPhones can't be cracked that way, and a ten digit passcode can absolutely not be cracked in your life time.
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Well, it might come as a surprise to you, but in real world breaking an encryption does not work by guessing the pin on the third try like in movies. It does not matter if there are 10 digits or 76. Someone will find a way around it given money and time.
Re: Confusing (Score:3)
My point was that NO system is unbreakable. Its just the matter of price. In San Bernardino case government also argued with Apple that it is impossible to decrypt - until it suddenly wasn't. I guess someone decided that court case with Apple would be less cost effective.
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My point was that NO system is unbreakable. Its just the matter of price.
... except that there are unbreakable systems. Or at least systems that at the moment are unbreakable. A properly generated and used one-time pad is a trivial example.
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Well, yeah. Unbreakable for me and you.
But give someone enough time and money and they aren't. Some government agency with enough funds and talent (and motivation). If history has taught us anything - all encryption systems will be broken in due time.
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Modern cryptography has made some good strides in becoming resistant to attacks as the actual science and mathematics behind crypto were formalized. So while things like AES, Serpent, and Twofish have some some undiscovered weaknesses
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We are not even talking about encryption as such.
We are talking about a phone which consists of encryption plus hardware plus software that makes use of said encryption. I would bet a fortune that this combination will be broken into sooner rather than later.
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My point was that NO system is unbreakable.
A system can be unbreakable at this point in time.
It could be so expensive to break a system that it is not worth the cost to do it for every single case.
It is also possible that the system was broken by an intelligence agency who has a vested interest in keeping that brokenness a secret so people will continue to use the system.
I.e., if the CIA or NSA could break into a modern iPhone, they're not going to do it just to bust one criminal---no matter how bad.
If the government breaks in without (a) disclosing
Re: Confusing (Score:5)
So how do you account for the fact that, in the protections against unreasonable search and seizure enshrined in the 4th amendment, the authors of the Constitution had no concept of an unbreakable lock? The 4th provides a mechanism to balance privacy rights with the government's obligation to enforce law and prosecute based on evidence procured through a probable cause based search. At that time, it was understood that no lock or container, no matter how stout, could not be defeated to execute a warranted search. Today, though, encryption technology has created personal, unbreakable locks in virtually everyone's possession. Law enforcement still has the same obligation to search these devices if there is probably cause to believe they contain evidence of a crime, but they can't break the lock. A court order to provide the passcode is not a violation of the 5th, because providing a key to your unbreakable lock is not an admission or statement of guilt. It is merely providing the key to your unbreakable lock that the 4th amendment allows the government to search based on probable cause.
How is it any different than a defendant refusing to reveal where he hid the tools of his crime? The police suspect that he killed Colonel Mustard in the LIbrary with a lead pipe, but without the pipe, they are unable to prove it. The police could spend millions of dollars combing through many square miles of land looking for the weapon (just like they could spend millions of dollars trying to hack into the device), but can they compel the defendant to reveal exactly where he buried it, even if the defendant claims he forgot?
If the cell phone owner was separated from his phone for any length of time, I can believe that he forgot the code - when I lost my tablet for a month and I got it back again, I couldn't remember my passphrase and had to wipe it and reset it.
Re: Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a lawyer, but in my opinion it isn't any different. My understanding of the fifth amendment is that for police absolutely cannot compel a suspect to reveal the location of a murder weapon (or incriminate themselves in any way). If investigators can demonstrate probable cause, they can obtain a search warrant to locate said weapon (and other things can be compelled, such as DNA or fingerprints). However, compelling a suspect (who is innocent until proven guilty) to reveal the location of a murder weapon would be a textbook case of self-incrimination, and a violation of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution.
Re: Confusing (Score:5, Informative)
Let me simplify this for you:
NEVER TALK TO THE POLICE
Don't tell them it is your phone, don't say you know the password, etc. Ask for your lawyer.
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Re: Confusing (Score:3)
Well said. There are many cases that we just can't solve due to the restrictions of the system. The founding fathers knew this. And it is a small price to pay to have a just and fair system of justice.
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The difference is, in your hypothetical they haven't proven that he's guilty, so they can't prove he knows where the murder weapon is. That is why they're demanding testimony.
In the case of a lock, they've already proven that you owned the lock. For example, if they searched your house and confiscated a locked safe, they can prove to a satisfactory degree that you owned the safe, and it is reasonable to presume that a person knows how to open their own safe. So there is nothing testimonial about admitting y
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The difference comes up when the police know that evidence is contained within the suspect's property. If the police don't know where the pipe is, they can't do anything. But if they know or strongly suspect (with corroborating evidence) the pipe is in the suspect's house, they
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The difference is that I don't have to help the police find a pipe. They can get permission to tear my place apart, but not to compel me to tell them where to look. The comparable thing would be requiring me to hand my phone over to the police. Instead, the defendant is ordered to divulge information, and that's arguably being a witness against himself in a criminal case. It's clear that a suspect can be compelled to hand over a safe key, but whether a suspect can be compelled to hand over a safe combi
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So how do you account for the fact that, in the protections against unreasonable search and seizure enshrined in the 4th amendment, the authors of the Constitution had no concept of an unbreakable lock?
The authors of the Constitution had a very good understanding of codes and ciphers. The ideas go back to roman times if not earlier. Codes and ciphers are at issue here not locks. The question is if the authors would consider being forced to decode a message to be self incriminating or not. I think they would not as knowledge of a code implies strong evidence that there was prior knowledge of the information encoded in the first place - that is self incrimination. One if by land, two if by sea and all
Re: Confusing (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard this discussed a multitude of ways, and one that worries me concerns the difference between discovery and production. And tampering/destroying evidence.
One theory is that refusing to give a passcode/password/key is the equivalent of refusing to produce, pursuant to a warrant or subpoena, but the 5th should still apply. The authorities can come get your phone, as they could come take a safe from your home or office, but are you required to open that container?
On the other hand, if you've forgotten how to open the safe, or phone, how do they prove you are in fact able? I've got a few passwords I know, but to tell you them I have to think through typing them. I could forget them, or more accurately be unable to remember them, under stress. Maybe.
And God forbid I have an accomplice that, for an iPhone, would enter iCloud and change credentials, perhaps making it really really hard for me to access my phone and data. What if they wiped my phone remotely, and could not be found? I'm in jail throughout all this, how could I be held to account if they could not prove a conspiracy?
The 5th Amendment is being wiped away. Not good.
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The kind where you give them the wrong code, the phone explodes
Ooops
Sorry, no evidence of any crime
Or better yet, immediately plants trojan in the Cop Computer that steals the cop passwords to private slush fund files
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And this is why we need new encryption
The kind where you give them the wrong code, the phone explodes
Ooops
Sorry, no evidence of any crime
Don't try it. It's destruction of evidence, a crime in itself. And judge and jury will draw conclusions from the fact that you destroyed the evidence. It's beyond reasonable doubt that the evidence was there and you destroyed it.
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You can set up an iPhone 5S or later to allow ten tries at the passcode before it wipes the AES-256 key and renders the contents of the phone completely unreadable. You can't do it fast, since there's lockouts of increasing length.
Having that set is not violating the law.
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how is it different to provide a passcode vs. to provide the information in your head about your crime?
it allows government to search but in no way does it say that you have to tell them where you put the key and which individuals you confessed your crime to.
look, in some countries you're supposed to actually testify against yourself and provide help and not remain silent..
now the dude is doing 180 days for something they supposedly cannot prove? if they didn't have enough proof already how do they have t
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Today, though, encryption technology has created personal, unbreakable locks in virtually everyone's possession.
No, they are breakable. We just don't know how many months or decades will pass before they become breakable.
Law enforcement still has the same obligation to search these devices if there is probably cause to believe they contain evidence of a crime
Law enforcement has no legal concept enshrined which requires it to violate the CotUS in order to pursue the possibility of crime. In fact, if the only way they can prove a crime is committed is to use information obtained by violating the self-incrimination, that is basically grounds to dismiss a case.
A court order to provide the passcode is not a violation of the 5th, because providing a key to your unbreakable lock is not an admission or statement of guilt.
Bullshit. That's just you making up crap to support coerced, self-incriminating investigations.
Re:Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your concept of Absolute Proof isn't used by any court at any level for any decision.
And when it comes to your statement about the contents of your brain, the Judge will have to decide to the standard of proof appropriate for the exact stage and nature of the inquiry.
The "express intent" of the 5th Amendment is not as you wildly claim. The fifth Amendment states:
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Its as simple as this. The court cannot make a judgement on the contents of your brain. If you say you forgot your passcode, by the 5th Amendment, the court is absolutely bound to accept that as the end of it. They dont have to believe you, it doesnt matter, the law forbids them from punishing you for it. The express intent of the 5th is to prevent the court from pretending to be mind readers and then acting on it.
There is one obvious fault with your argument: Reality doesn't agree with it. One guy was convicted. Obviously your credentials as slashdot reader and general "bloke on the internet" make it obvious that your knowledge of law is better than that of the judge. Or maybe it doesn't? And I mean seriously, you are saying that a court is absolutely bound to believe whatever you say? That's nonsense.
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The person in question was not convicted, but rather found in contempt of court. That the judge has a much better grasp of the law doesn't mean the judge can't make mistakes. That's the whole reason we have appellate courts.
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These amandments I hear so much about: I think I am going to print them out as they have much more vallue as wall decoration.
They're most often used for toilet paper these days.
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It does however apply to thought crime.
Re: Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between the two being that US Federal and State governments are supposed to be bound by Constitutional rights. That said, coercing someone to confess to a crime actually IS a violation of their human rights. You might work on bringing your government up to speed on that. We did, once, and apparently need to again.
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How do they collect something only you know?
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How do they collect something only you know?
With a 5 dollar wrench. You can argue that there is no difference between that and forced DNA extraction as you can't guarantee that without it investigators will be able to collect DNA samples.
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I'm actually surprised that 'I don't remember' worked. Say they look at phone records with the company and see a call made earlier on the day of the arrest. So you remembered your password at 10:38 am, 11:14 am, 12:22 pm, and 2:48 pm, but at 4 pm you don't remember?
Re: Confusing (Score:2)
It is in the article. They asked for the code 10 months later.
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Say they look at phone records with the company and see a call made earlier on the day of the arrest. So you remembered your password at 10:38 am, 11:14 am, 12:22 pm, and 2:48 pm, but at 4 pm you don't remember?
"Hey Siri, call Bob at the office."
Do you actually need to unlock your phone for it to function as a phone? I can dial strait from the voice recognition without unlocking on mine.
Worst. Summary. Ever. (Score:5, Informative)
This is two different stories.
Wesley Victor, as it says, is not in jail. Christopher Wheeler, in a completely separate and unrelated case, is.
This has been a public service announcement.
TFS has Schizophrenia (Score:2)
It can't make up his mind about whether he prevailed or failed. And that's because it fails to explain that 'A Hollywood man' from sentence one is not the same person as 'Wesley Victor' from sentence two.
Wesley prevailed. Christopher Wheeler failed.
Well, jeez folks... (Score:5, Insightful)
...you people seem to think you have a right to be secure in your persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures or something!
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What happens when the judge issues a warrant for something I can not provide?
How do I prove that I do not have the password anymore?
Do we now have an unattainable burden of proof on the defendant?
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In terms of this specific type of situation, I'm in the middle on it. Demanding a password should never be allowed as a way of establishing access or ownership; if a phone is found at a crime scene, the prosecutor should not be able to demand the password from you and then use the fact that you know the password as evidence that you were at the crime scene. If it's already shown beyond a reasonable doubt that you own a phone, though (such as the
Two cases in neighboring Florida counties (Score:5, Informative)
The summary doesn't make it clear that these are two separate cases, both in Florida.
Christopher Wheeler is in Broward County and was sentenced to 180 days in jail for refusing to give police his password. He claims he already gave it to them, but the one he gave them doesn't work, hence the contempt of court ruling. Meanwhile, in an entirely separate case, Wesley Victor in neighboring Miami-Dade County claimed he didn't remember the password when he was ordered to provide it 10 months after his arrest, and the judge did not hold him in contempt.
From what I understand (as an Internet armchair lawyer, i.e. IANAL), both of these actually make sense. Wheeler, from the sounds of things, had indicated through his previous actions and testimony that it was his phone and that he knew the password, so supplying the password would not be considered testimonial in nature at that point, which is why passwords typically can't be compelled from people. As such, it makes sense to hold him in contempt of court if he refuses to hand over a password that they've already established he has. As for Victor, it had been 10 months since they had confiscated his phone, and he never claimed to remember the password at that point, so it makes sense (at least to me) that they wouldn't hold him in contempt of court.
What might be more interesting is Victor's girlfriend, who's in the same situation he is, but who provided the wrong password for her phone. If she's NOT held in contempt of court after doing so, it would be interesting to hear what the court's rationale is.
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Can a suspect be compelled to open up a locker/safe etc ? That sounds like the best real-world analog to the passcode on a phone or computer password.
On an aside, police like this kind of thing since that phone probably has a TON of unrelated fucking nibbles of data they could sift through to either
a) bring up new charges
b) use in other cases (such as if a drug suspect gets nabbed)
c) things that aren't strictly illegal, but otherwise embarrassing that could be used as leverage against the suspect.
Because on
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Can a suspect be compelled to open up a locker/safe etc ? That sounds like the best real-world analog to the passcode on a phone or computer password.
My understanding is that a suspect cannot be forced to provide a combination to a safe. In such circumstances the police or prosecution is free to drill the lock or hire a professional lock smith to open it provided they can get a warrant, just like they would be allowed go and hire their own cryptologist and super computer to try and crack some crypto. The big beef is that unlike high end safes that are resistant to drilling and cracking, strong crypto is ubiquitous unlike really good safes.
Also I think a
Re: Two cases in neighboring Florida counties (Score:2)
I remember seeing a lengthy discussion about this on an Android forum... someone made a custom ROM that could be configured to wipe the phone if you touched the fingerprint sensor with one or two specific "kill" fingers (say, your ring finger, or your ring finger followed by your middle finger to silently confirm).
The general consensus: you'd have to be *insane* to use it to do something as brazen as a factory reset. Especially if you're doing it just to make a legal statement... the US legal system doesn't
Re:Two cases in neighboring Florida counties (Score:4, Insightful)
Ya it isn't completely clear since the article and summary are mixing cases but I can see a contempt ruling if you agreed you had a password, supposedly provided it, it didn't work, and then you tried to play dumb. While you aren't required to testify against yourself, that doesn't mean you can actively work to try and screw the court over.
So what to do if you are in a situation where the police demand you hand over a password? Keep your mouth shut. Same advice as defense attorneys will give for all things involving law enforcement. Tell them you want a lawyer and you aren't answering any questions. Your lawyer can then advise you on how to proceed. That is the whole thrust of the Miranda warning: You can keep your mouth shut and not answer any questions and wait to talk to a lawyer. You have that right, and they have to let you know you do. So use it.
But for sure don't do something stupid like say "Sure here's the code," and give them a fake code. There is no way that can help you, and multiple ways it can hurt you.
New way for the spooks to lock you up. (Score:5, Insightful)
They demand your password, and you hand it over, not wanting to go to jail for half a year. They open your phone, change the password to something random, and lock it. See you in prison.
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So you demand that they keep the screen of your phone in your sight at all times. It's like bring a diamond ring into a jeweller to get the stones re-set - you don't let the diamonds out of your sight. Same for you phone.
There should really be laws (or at least guidelines) in place to ensure that 2 or more officers are present when someone's phone is taken from them. I'm guessing there aren't, though...!?
I am truly sorry your honor! (Score:2)
But when under stressful situations I have difficulty remembering numbers. Ask my my social security number, I won't remember that either.
This is getting way too intense, and I am feel very stressed. can I please go now? No? That seems cruel, and unusual.
Nice way to frame somebody! (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Ask for passcode
2. Unlock phone, find no incriminating evidence, change passcode and lock phone again
3. Claim wrong code was provided
Voila, guilty until proven innocent. Which the accused cannot do.
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2. Unlock phone, find no incriminating evidence, change passcode and lock phone again
Why not going further: Unlock, then inject into the phone some incriminating evidence. Guys, at some point we need to trust ad minima the legal authorities.
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1. Ask for passcode 2. Unlock phone, find no incriminating evidence, change passcode and lock phone again 3. Claim wrong code was provided
Voila, guilty until proven innocent. Which the accused cannot do.
That would never happen, here is the actual sequence of events in today's legal system. 1. Ask for passcode 2. Unlock phone, find no incriminating evidence 3. Plant child porn downloaded from the FBI 4. Change passcode and lock phone again 5. Have a "clean" officer (who does not know about steps 1 through 4) use the Israeli law enforcement hacking tool to re-unlock the phone 6. Prosecute suspect for child pornography
I don't think we're talking about a case where the FBI or Israeli law enforcement might be involved. We're talking about a single cop who thinks the guy is guilty, like the ones that claim they were being attacked by a suspect and shot him, till it's revealed their's video that disproves their testimony, simply doing this because it's a quick fix. Hopefully, we'd have an evidence system that would prevent such actions, but then again, doubtful.
Horrible headline (Score:2)
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No he was jailed because he can't remember the password. He can't tell the judge something he doesn't know.
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But it amounts to the same invasion of privacy, which is the same thing no matter who it comes from.
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In the US we hold them to be very different things. For instance, a judge is required to approve entry to a home to look for evidence. The officer is charged with solving a crime, the prosecutor with prosecuting it, and the judge with enforcing limits on them (and the defense).
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Well that's clearly not how its working here. The judge isn;t enforcing limits on the cops, he's using the system to apply duress to the defendant, which by everything I've read is illegal under US law.
The fact is that in the US, the judges clearly believe themselves to be above the law because they sometimes act without regard to the law, and even in direct contradiction to it. The real problem is that no one holds them accountable.
"I've given them the password" (Score:5, Funny)
"I swear, under oath, I've given them the password," a distraught Wheeler, his hands handcuffed behind his back, told Circuit Judge Michael Rothschild
He had explained that his password was "fourwordsalluppercase"; one word, all lowercase.
The working code... (Score:2)
...is likely one of these:
#include
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
for (int i=0; i10000; i++) {
printf ("%04d\n", i);
}
}
Can I go free now?
I'd be in trouble (Score:2)
My password is "I don't remember".
I forgot? (Score:2)
So if a judge refuses to take your I forgot the PIN defence and jails you for contempt, excluding a 5th amendment defence what are you to do.
Well this guy now has 180 days to start from 00000 & work to 99999, handing the completed list to the cops with the honest statement, the code is one of the items on this list, now let me out.
Re: (Score:2)
What I say below applies to almost any country based on English law.
The significant difference is "reasonable belief".
If a kidnapper takes a child, hides her away, and then gets arrested without her, your scenarios also apply to the location of the child. It's information, in his head, that you can't torture him or whatever into giving up. He might well refuse to tell you.
If, however, you have a reasonable belief that he KNOWS where the child is hidden away, i.e. you arrested him while he was on the run a
Re: (Score:2)
The Constitution allows for the issuance of a warrant, supported by probable cause, to search for evidence of a crime. A warrant was issued for the phone and specifically the data on the phone. That is the 4th Amendment being applied properly. The 5th applies to producing testimony against yourself. Data on a phone is not testimony. It is evidence if anything. Whether that evidence leads to a conviction or not is up to the prosecution / defense arguments.
Think of it this way...
If you write a note that says,
Re: (Score:2)
The 5th applies to producing testimony against yourself. Data on a phone is not testimony.
True, but the passcode is, as long as the only place it is being stored is in the defendant's head. The way the iPhone works, is the data is encrypted, and part of the decryption key is the passcode. The warrant gives police access to the data on the phone which is ciphertext. The police are welcome to that and no one is stopping them from getting that. But the police don't want the ciphertext; the police want the plaintext. The plaintext is found by combining the ciphertext with the passcode (which is
Re: (Score:2)
That he has a passcode or not is not normally a fact that proves or disproves a crime. Simply stated, locking your iPhone is not a crime, Therefor being compelled to unlock it is not incriminating. (a bit circular, but that's how I understand it)
Being forced to testify as to the contents of your phone is not allowed by the Fifth Amendment. If you're being interrogated by the police or on the stand and they ask if you have anything on your phone they should know about. You can use your Fifth Amendment right
Re:Gut unfortunately says Judicial ruling right. (Score:4)
The act of giving a password etc. is not actually incriminating in itself.
In the past, at least before cellphones and computers, courts have interpreted the Fifth Amendment much more broadly than you suggest. Any testimony which may lead police to discover crimes you've committed is considered, for the purposes of a 5th Amendment analysis, to be incriminating. The 5th Amendment doesn't merely protect you from having to testify "Yes, I killed my wife," it also protects you from having to testify that you had driven to a secluded spot on the coast the following morning where you hid her body.
Re: (Score:2)
So what you do is make it believable that you cannot provide the means for them to unlock the devicee. Wetware could be your friend here.. granted, it may still be a few years away before we can feasibly do this, but you tie your password in part to what you are thinking as you enter it, and it may even be
Re: (Score:2)
It could be done with some biometrics - is your pulse or blood pressure higher than normal, eye dialation, etc. Could be done with current tech...
Re: (Score:2)
Because some yahoos think that there is an analog outside of computers: Many believe a court can compel you to hand over the keys (or combination) to a safe.
That's not strictly true.
What a court can do is take possession of the safe, and then hire somebody to open it for them. Competent locksmiths are generally able to defeat a keyed lock in minutes, and many of the better locksmiths can open a combination safe in a few hours. Worst case, there's always the direct approach: drills, grinders, pry bars, and