Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused • Hacker News Board

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#291

Post by pdimitar » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #282

pdimitar wrote: post #53

Formally the police can't demand a lot of stuff. Informally, they'll put you in a room and tell you that they have the legal right to keep you anywhere from 24 to 72 hours in there and they definitely can make you reconsider during that period -- to put it very mildly. Hint: some cops are really good in the skill of inflicting pain to people without lasting medical trace to prove it afterwards. Until there's true acc…

How does transparency help? If cops have a legal right to hold you for 72 hours that doesn’t change if more transparency happens.

Well, I mean, transparency means that footage of the cells of arrested people don't routinely disappear due to "technical glitches" as it regularly happens in my country. :(

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#292

Post by Diederich » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #174

LinuxBender wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. That's why I believe it might be super handy if every or at least many phones had this in place so that you don't really stand out. At least every phone using an alternate OS. If all the mainstream operating systems had this I would expect an arms race between the OS devs and the forensics device devs. As a side note, this would not necessarily be only used for law enforcement authorities. It could be that an…

> It could be that an armed phone thief requires you to unlock your phone. This exact scenario happened to me. They made me do a factory reset right in front of them, before handing the phone over. I didn't have any opportunity to do anything other than what they asked, and I probably would have been killed if I tried. I don't see how I would have been able to make use of such a feature in that scenario or any simila…

> I probably would have been killed if I tried

Wow...are you comfortable sharing more details? Thanks.

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#293

Post by AnthonyMouse » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

quacked wrote: post #124

sethammons wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> political persuasion and education level Sorry, I'm not following. My understanding is that the job attracts bullies and I see bullies from all political persuasions and all education levels.

The police job attracts most people who do not have a college degree, are white, and lean into conservative/justice-heavy politics. Many of those people are bullies. That doesn't mean anything about people that do not have a college degree, or white people, or conservative/justice-heavy politics, it just means something about the police job and the people who agree to take it. We're looking at probability of (white A…

> The police job attracts most people who do not have a college degree, are white, and lean into conservative/justice-heavy politics.

12.4% of police officers are black, compared to 11.9% of the US population. "White" is slightly over-represented as well. Both of these are mainly a result of "Other" and especially "Asian" being significantly under-represented.

The primary disparity is by sex. 84.5% of police are male.

https://datausa.io/profile/soc/police-officers

The percentage of police officers with a four year degree is ~30%, about the same as the adult general population.

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#294

Post by godelski » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

kingcharles wrote: post #273

voakbasda wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with expecting accountability is that system will fail you at the next step: the courts. You have to survive that process too, where the judge and prosecutor will believe the cop nine times out of ten. As a sitting federal judge once said, “truth and justice have no relevance; it is a court of law.” The law will take the side of the system.

This. The police will lie and the judge will take their word. In my case the police said they can break 2048-bit AES encryption easily and as a backup could unsolder the chips (they didn't say which chips) and put them in another device to get the data. The judge believed it all. The police had no qualifications in computer science or encryption.

This is a bit insane. You mention in another comment you spent 8 years in jail because you didn't give your password. Does a judge not connect the two things and say "okay, well why haven't you done that then?" Seems like if they could (I know they can't) then they would be wasting everyone's time.

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#295

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

BobbyJo wrote: post #251

63 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy to me the amount that people who have never dealt with the cops think "I'll just show them x legal code so they can see they don't have the right to do that." Turns out, they don't care. For minor infractions, they'll use whatever intimidation and coercion they want, then make you feel lucky for letting you out because they didn't feel like prosecuting. In most circumstances, the word of the person with th…

It's also amazing the amount of people who have never dealt with cops who think it's a giant, unthinking, unfeeling blob, and make broad generalizations about how it behaves and what its flaws are. I've dealt with lots of cops for minor stuff (trespassing, traffic infractions, crashed parties), and have only had a bad experience (turned out fine anyway) once. I have several relatives who have been in and out of the s…

The problem is that the assholes too often don't face repercussions.

If you have the right to refuse to unlock your phone for a cop, then a cop that demands it even after the suspect has actively refused it should be reprimanded.

The meme of "We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" runs rampant because it's often true. Police have literally gotten away with murder, either because the DA or whoever decides to not press charges, or the prosecution literally sabotages their own case to protect the police, as in the case of the shooting of Daniel Shaver, where the prosecution and defense attorneys asked the judge to not show the bodycam footage to the jury [0]. Anybody who's seen that video knows how damning it was, and it's absolutely reprehensible that a prosecutor would want to not show it to the jury. What made it so much worse was that the police department released the video only a couple hours after the trial had completed with the Not Guilty verdict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver#Body...

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#296

Post by auganov » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #212

pdimitar wrote: post #53

Formally the police can't demand a lot of stuff. Informally, they'll put you in a room and tell you that they have the legal right to keep you anywhere from 24 to 72 hours in there and they definitely can make you reconsider during that period -- to put it very mildly. Hint: some cops are really good in the skill of inflicting pain to people without lasting medical trace to prove it afterwards. Until there's true acc…

> Technically airport security can't make you unlock your phone in many countries as well but I've known two former colleagues who were "convinced" to do so in the airport's back room; the one where problematic passengers are held for 8-24h. Which is why I refuse to travel outside of the Schengen area. Even if I'd really like to visit the US one day once corona passes, there is absolutely no way I'll consent to essen…

> Which is why I refuse to travel outside of the Schengen area.

Just one data point:

A few days ago was pulled over in Germany, I assume, for travelling on foreign plates from a small (Schengen area) country. Initially we thought we must have broken some traffic rule we weren't aware of. But it seemed more like an immigration check. Asked for passports, searched the car and asked a lot of questions. Didn't even check the driver's license and the likes, so definitely not a traffic stop.

Not particularly paranoid about this kind of stuff and they seemed nice, but I'd certainly try to push back if this has happened in the US. Don't know much about German law, I may be wrong, but I'm assuming like in most of Europe you don't have much of a right to refuse unless it's a very unusual ask (which searching a phone may be)

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#297

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

lr4444lr wrote: post #286

ineptech wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every profession has abusive people; it's a structural issue when a profession can't or won't weed them out.

What profession has an effective method of weeding out abusive people?

This is 100% a bad faith question. And even if it's being asked in good faith, it's entirely irrelevant. It's essentially whataboutism. But I'll address it anyways.

If I have an abusive co-worker in my tech job and my manager and HR refuse to do anything about it, it just makes work suck.

But an abusive cop ruins lives with bullshit charges and bullshit handling of innocent people. In worst-case scenarios, they're murderers that get away with it.

So yeah...it's a pretty clear distinction, and I refuse to believe you're asking this question in good faith.

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#298

Post by buildbot » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

namelessoracle wrote: post #81

lugged wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't a lot of cp cases hinge on being able to compel computer owners to decrypt hard drives?

Yes, but the case law for this is beyond complex and changes by jurisdiction. I think it hinges on if the search for the hard drives is for specific files or exploratory. IOW "we saw traffic that led us to believe he downloaded this specific piece of CP on this date and we want to verify its there" vs "we believe there is CP on his hard drive based on testimony from this person who said he shared CP with that person"…

I feel like this precedent makes it a liability to have any old encrypted drives around that you've forgotten the password too...

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#299

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #53

Formally the police can't demand a lot of stuff. Informally, they'll put you in a room and tell you that they have the legal right to keep you anywhere from 24 to 72 hours in there and they definitely can make you reconsider during that period -- to put it very mildly. Hint: some cops are really good in the skill of inflicting pain to people without lasting medical trace to prove it afterwards. Until there's true acc…

[deleted]

Re: Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

#300

Post by ashtonkem » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #128

> this case turns on one of the most fundamental protections in our constitutional system: an accused person’s ability to exercise his Fifth Amendment rights without having his silence used against him. A very interesting tidbit I learned here on HN a couple years back — the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that you have to declare out loud an intent to invoke your Fifth Amendment rights, if you haven’t been formally arre…

Then there’s the absurd case where a defendant was found to have not invoked his 5th amendment rights by saying “I want a lawyer dawg”. The court, with laughably straight faces, decided that he might have been asking for a dog lawyer.

Courts can be shockingly corrupt.