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Always remember: your fingerprint is identification. You can be forced to identify yourself to law enforcement. Do not make it your password. Your password is something you know, not something you are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So do you think it's reasonable that contempt of court can carry a life sentence without even being convicted by a jury of your peers? Is contempt of court a worse crime than assault or manslaughter? You have the right to not divulge information from your mind that would incriminate yourself. In the US this is called the 5th amendment.
Before you're given contempt for not divulging information you are given immunity from criminal charges as a result of that testimony.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard more than one person say if you're going to have to surrender your phone, if there's even the risk of it, turn it off.
At the very least, use the wrong finger 5 times on the sensor and it will disable the Touch ID.
Always remember: your fingerprint is identification. You can be forced to identify yourself to law enforcement. Do not make it your password. Your password is something you know, not something you are.
You can be forced to do lots of things by law enforcement, like give up your password which is something other than your fingerprint.
> The court's ruling noted that FBI forensic examiners were unable to get past TrueCrypt's encryption (and therefore were unable to access the data) unless Doe either decrypted the drives or gave the FBI the password, and the court then ruled that Doe's Fifth Amendment right to remain silent legally prevented the Government from making him or her do so.
So it seems like the law is a bit ambiguous on this front.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before you're given contempt for not divulging information you are given immunity from criminal charges as a result of that testimony.
Source? That is certainly not true in general.
Could it be argued that the knowledge of which finger (or part of your finger) you use for authentication is equivalent to a passcode?
Conversely, is there anything preventing them from having you try all ten fingers?
That said, even if they guess that you're most likely to use your thumb, there is still a chance you can't unlock the device, especially on pre-6S devices, since the sensor is a lot more finnicky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contempt is a terrifying charge, because under current law, you can be jailed indefinitely for the same contempt charge for as long as you refuse to cooperate with whatever the court thinks you should cooperate with. There's no upper bound there. So that wouldn't solve the problem.
Contempt is a weird power in general, especially when it's used for reasons like "disrespecting the judge." If I am disrespectful to the governor of my state, or if I'm disrespectful to a police officer, or if I'm disrespectful to a fireman or a bailiff or a legislator or a district attorney or a teacher or the President, that is a thing that I can legally do. But for some reason it's not outrageous for a judge to se…
The rights of protest and speech cannot be the same in courts, even to the same degree as a place like congress or the offices of the executive. (And in those last two cases, the right of speech is also curtailed.) Otherwise, the courts wouldn't be able to function, particularly in the case of an adversarial court system.
As an analogy, years ago I was part of a small alliance in Eve that consistently won battles. But as we were winning, the server would crash and the devs would come in and roll-back the damage we had done.
The courts have a hard enough time as it is functioning. I am involved in a case against an assailant, and I learned that it's very typical for defense attorneys to purposely drag out cases to maximize victim fatigue. The defense attorney somehow has surgery scheduled on the hearing dates. A legal system is very complicated. It's likely to have more loopholes than a software system has bugs. And it's probably a lot harder and more time consuming to fix those.
This is why "contempt of court" exists.
Touch ID is disabled when an iPhone initially powers on. So, if you want to prevent law enforcement compelling you to decrypt using your fingerprint , hold down the power button and then slide right to power off the phone. Now they need your password.
This, and other comments to the effect of purposely messing up your fingerprint to force PIN/password entry, are all technically effective. However, if you perform any of these actions after an encounter with law enforcement or the legal system has already started, it strikes me that your actions could be interpreted as destruction of evidence. IANAL, though. Even using a PIN over a fingerprint is enough to piss off…
These things are very poor candidates for access control because you need fuzzy statistical/ML/AI/CV recognition techniques (which means you have to worry about false positives and false negatives), and it's basically impossible to re-issue credentials in case of a compromise (changing someone's fingerprints or facial characteristics would require performing plastic surgery on the user!)
But because of movies and TV, everyone "knows" that in the future we're supposed to have our technology unlocked by our fingerprints, so that's what drives people to buy and vendors to implement, regardless of how absurdly impractical it is if you actually stop to think about it for five seconds.