Ruling: Thumbprint scan is like a "blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking."

The legal situation is more complex and nuanced than the headline implies, so the article is worth reading. This adds another ruling to the confusing case history regarding forced biometric unlocking.

Careful locking your device before the cops get there. It could be considered tampering with evidence.

Even if this is true, and I’m not arguing that it isn’t, if you’ve committed a different crime with a worse punishment, you’ll have to take that into consideration.

In the States police can bust you on false charges and it will typically (but not always) fly in court.

They also have strong phone cracking software, despite what FBI says about piles of evidence locked away in phones.

Evidence is not a thing until you are at least accused of a crime or detained.

That’s not completely true. In most states if they are knocking down your door with a search warrant and you flush a kilo of heroin down the toilet, you’re getting an evidence tampering charge that will hold up in court.

They would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you only flushed it after hearing them knock on the door.

There’s a whole lot of caselaw surrounding this, and they will get someone to destroy the pipes to find out when they were flushed (their word goes, good luck finding someone impartial to say that wasn’t what happened). I wish court cases were built on 1’s and 0’s like computer code but that’s just not the way the world works.

https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/2011/05/27/evidence-recovery-can-be-dirty-job-police/14540952007/

Got any evidence to back that up?

Not anymore, they tampered with it

Source: his arse?

Even then, in his arse, they’d have to prove the person locked it.

But what’s worse, getting a tampering with evidence charge, or giving them everything?

Still would like to see his source.

The source:

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 2.96K Posts
  • 74.6K Comments
  • Modlog