from Hacker News

Police push legal boundaries to get into cellphones

by timemachine on 6/7/19, 3:23 PM with 94 comments

• by oarabbus_ on 6/7/19, 4:11 PM

  >The officers demanded his passcodes, warning him they’d get warrants to search the cellphones. Montanez suspected that police were trying to fish for evidence of illegal activity. He also didn’t want them seeing more personal things, including intimate pictures of his girlfriend.

  The police have a right to attempt you trick you into giving up information you shouldn't. Plead the fifth/don't talk to the police.

  >So he refused, and was locked up on the drug and firearms charges.

  This is fair.

  >Five days later, after Montanez was bailed out of jail, a deputy from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office tracked him down, handed him the warrants and demanded the phone passcodes. Again, Montanez refused. Prosecutors went to a judge, who ordered him locked up again for contempt of court.

  This is also fair. The police acquired a warrant and presented the warrant legally. The man refused, committing the crime of contempt of court, which is a fair and just punishment for refusing to heed a court-issued warrant. It's also within his right to decide to serve the time for contempt of court rather than providing the password.

  Yes, there are lots of bigger issues touched upon in this story, but the headline seems sensationalist. Didn't the police do the right thing by obtaining a warrant for the password?

• by metalliqaz on 6/7/19, 4:15 PM

  Plausible deniability. Encryption systems that are designed for countering a hostile threat that can force you to divulge the key have two passwords. One opens your real data, one opens a decoy. It would be nice is phones had that feature.

• by joshuaheard on 6/7/19, 4:08 PM

  He went to jail for contempt of court for ignoring a court order, not just disobeying police to unlock his phone. This would be true for any court order. In the article, it appears the police had probable cause for the warrant to search the phone by the text popup that appeared on the locked phone.

• by LinuxBender on 6/7/19, 5:35 PM

  This seems to me like a technical problem. Assuming one must really store sensitive things on smart phones, there should be a way to do this AND allowing one to share the phone unlocked with an adversary without risk of leaking data. Multiple unlock codes maybe?

  Maybe a tertiary duress code that starts a timer and performs predefined actions after {n} minutes. i.e. send control code to a server, notify friends, family, lawyer you are under duress with GPS coordinates, wipe phone at the risk of destroying evidence, start sending audio to youtube, transfer / delegate data to a different predefined device, etc... Might be useful if you are being mugged.

• by jimbob45 on 6/7/19, 4:14 PM

  Well, in my opinion, the closest analogue would be mail. Can the police search through your mail?

  https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/can-the-polic...

  The answer is yes, with a search warrant. Therefore, I see no reason that a phone should be treated differently.

• by squarefoot on 6/7/19, 7:46 PM

  Phone OSes should allow the user to exercise plausible deniability by having dual or multiple passwords or other physical means of telling the phone to unlock only in a safe mode that will reveal innocuous documents or photos, job, relatives and friends contacts, and possibly let the inbox and outbox contain only conversations from clean numbers. If a cop signals to pull over, a short bossa nova tap on the phone case might get detected by the accelerometer and trigger that safe mode, until the user tells the phone the emergency is over by tapping a pataflafla followed by a paradiddle diddle (just kidding, but you get the point:^) Not that I condone any illegal use of cellphones, but often a wrong assumption by a police officer paired by his perceived omnipotence can easily escalate to a level much worse than the "crimes" they intended to prevent.

• by ThrustVectoring on 6/7/19, 6:15 PM

  IMO, the legal landscape here hasn't kept up with changing social conditions. A huge amount of social and personal activity is now getting mediated through technology, and legal protections have not been correspondingly extended.

  Cell phones routinely keep a log of who you've been talking to, when, and a big chunk of the actual contents. They also will often collect location history, or broadcast the location to third parties as part of their normal operation.

• by LifeLiverTransp on 6/7/19, 5:24 PM

  What if i programmed a phone to no reveal data, even with the correct passphrase, as long as the user is seen under pressure by law enforcement or society to reveal data?

• by jacamat on 6/7/19, 4:08 PM

  jail is not that bad.