from Hacker News

The FBI Forced a Suspect to Unlock Amazon’s Encrypted App Wickr with Their Face

by cmg on 7/20/22, 9:46 PM with 13 comments

• by dengxiaopeng on 7/20/22, 10:56 PM

  This is quite similar to circumstances that happened in Columbus, OH a few years ago. Same app, same law enforcement tactic:

  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/doj-claims-its-w...

• by dane-pgp on 7/20/22, 10:38 PM

  I wonder if there are copyright implications here. Do you own the copyright to the image that your phone takes of your face? What about the data that is created when you initially register your biometric?

  Also, when the unlock process is checking for a match, is it creating a derivative work? Would this legal argument hold any more weight if you formally registered the copyright? (You'd think that two people taking two pictures of a vaguely similar public subject on different days could not amount to a copyright violation, but a court might disagree[0]).

  Finally, does someone registering (or unlocking a device with) their biometrics grant a licence to or even ownership of that data to the company who manufactured the device? It would be interesting if the FBI had to request permission from Apple to create a derivative work of "their" copy of your face stored in their/your device.

  [0] https://www.wpt.co.uk/resources/news/copyright-in-photograph...

• by antonymy on 7/20/22, 11:53 PM

  Riding the bleeding edge has its risks in more ways than one. For now, law enforcement are taking full advantage to nail some easy targets with it. Wonder how long before this particular loophole is closed. Probably not until they start arresting people more sympathetic than pedophiles.

• by danhab99 on 7/20/22, 9:56 PM

  Is the horror of this situation the fact that biometric security is less secure than a memorized password, or the big-brother-esq coercion tactic they used?

• by mikece on 7/20/22, 10:08 PM

  Is this a stealth add for Amazon that not even they, when handed a warrant, can decrypt your Wickr data without Big Brother forcing a biometric unlock on you (or cutting you a plea deal to unlock the app so you can rat out the rest of your militia/gang/activists)?

• by jmprspret on 7/20/22, 10:39 PM

  Since when does Wickr allow biomentrics for login? Last time I used it, it was username+password.

• by Hnrobert42 on 7/20/22, 11:59 PM

  I wonder if you could refuse to open your eyes.