Thursday, October 20, 2016

Feds use search warrant to make everyone in building unlock their phones...

If the cops show up with a search warrant, well, you expect they can search the premises. But showing up with a warrant that says every single person on a certain property has to unlock their fingerprint-reading phones and present them for search, too? That’s… pretty surprising. And yet, it turns out, earlier this year, that’s what happened in California.

What happened, Forbes spotted, is this: the Justice Department wanted a warrant to search a property in California. So far, so good.

But that warrant included language authorizing investigators to “depress the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person who is located at the SUBJECT PREMISES during the execution of the search and who is reasonably believed by law enforcement to be the user of a fingerprint sensor-enabled device that is located at the SUBJECT PREMISES and falls within the scope of the warrant.”

In other words: with that warrant, cops can walk a house or apartment building and demand literally everyone inside immediately use their fingerprints to unlock their phones for inspection. To search the entire contents every single device, whether it belongs to an identified suspect or not, that may exist at the search location. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Canadian faces $20k fine, jail time for refusing to unlock phone...
  2. Why you should always password protect your smartphone...
  3. Cops might use your iPhone fingerprint against you...
  4. 'Password fatigue' haunts Internet masses...
  5. Teen jailed for refusing to reveal computer's password...
  6. Travellers' mobile phone data seized by police at border...

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