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

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

#371

Post by kingcharles »

godelski wrote: post #294
kingcharles wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The law is a bit complicated. I did give up my password when they threatened my wife. The judge ruled they obtained my password by coercion so they weren't permitted to use it. But then they came forward and said they would have eventually cracked my encryption anyway as they can crack 2048-bit AES easily, and even if they couldn't have cracked the encryption they would have unsoldered the chips (which chips?) and put them in another device and got access that way. The judge said in that case you can use the password you got through coercion because you would have got in anyway. That is allowed by the law, in the USA at least.

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

#372

Post by MichaelZuo »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #50
kryogen1c wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you joking? This is the exact opposite of plausible deniability. This feature requires premeditated user action to hide evidence in an attempt to mislead law enforcement. It is illegal.

No. I meant that “plausible deniability” is a thing, that if implemented properly will protect against these charges.

What happens when it becomes popular and police departments catch on? “plausible deniability” escalation is a two way street as others in this thread attest.

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

#373

Post by kingcharles »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #337
kingcharles wrote: post #264

This happened to me. The police wanted my password and refused my right to silence, wouldn't let me call a lawyer. I wouldn't talk. Then they threatened my wife and I gave up my password to stop them from hurting her. The password was suppressed by the court, but they let the police use it anyway because one of the officers (with no formal computer qualifications) testified he could have broken 2048-bit AES encryptio…

> Biometrics are not protected by the 5th Amendment in the USA as the police can legally force your finger onto a touchpad or hold your face in front of a camera. Where can I read about this distinction?

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/compelled-biometri...

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

#374

Post by kingcharles »

BeefySwain wrote: post #322
kingcharles wrote: post #264

This happened to me. The police wanted my password and refused my right to silence, wouldn't let me call a lawyer. I wouldn't talk. Then they threatened my wife and I gave up my password to stop them from hurting her. The password was suppressed by the court, but they let the police use it anyway because one of the officers (with no formal computer qualifications) testified he could have broken 2048-bit AES encryptio…

Did you appeal? Or reach out to the ACLU or EFF? I'll admit I'm somewhat skeptical of your account, but if true I would expect a post demonstrating so would be on the front page of this site quite quickly.

Where I live you can only appeal once you're found guilty at a trial. The case is over 8 years old now and I still haven't had trial. I would hope the appeal court would reverse, but I've had about a dozen cases wrongly denied by the appellate courts recently. The appellate courts are pretty much as biased as the trial courts, especially at the state level. The federal courts are a little bit smarter.

I've tried talking to the ACLU and EFF in the past but received no replies.

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

#375

Post by coliveira »

rootusrootus wrote: post #369
coliveira wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many of these cases its your word against the cop's word. Guess whose side the justice system takes...

Yes, a police officer is considered an officer of the court [1]. His exposure to consequences for lying is higher than the average citizen under oath. Given two conflicting statements that cannot be resolved with evidence, it isn't a surprise that the judge is going to defer to the cop. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/officer_of_the_court

> consequences for lying is higher than the average citizen

This has never stoped them from lying, since they already know who will be believed.

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

#376

Post by bleachedsleet »

kingcharles wrote: post #264

This happened to me. The police wanted my password and refused my right to silence, wouldn't let me call a lawyer. I wouldn't talk. Then they threatened my wife and I gave up my password to stop them from hurting her. The password was suppressed by the court, but they let the police use it anyway because one of the officers (with no formal computer qualifications) testified he could have broken 2048-bit AES encryptio…

Also, if you do use biometrics and ever find yourself in a sticky situation most modern operating systems have built in features to quickly disable them on demand. iOS, for example, allows you to quickly disable Face/Touch ID by holding the side+any volume button for two seconds and then quickly tap the side button again when the shutdown slide appears.

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

#377

Post by ChrisKnott »

jaytaylor wrote: post #308
ashtonkem wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was skeptical, but a quick web search verified that this 100% happened - recently even, in 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02... > The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the suspect was, in fact, asking for a “lawyer dog,” .. That's bad, dawg.

From reading the actual concurrence [0] I would say that, yes, it does appear from the way he quotes "lawyer dog" near the end, that the judge thought the suspect was making a flippant remark referring to a theoretical dog that is a lawyer, however, (as the quotes from the lawyers later in the WP article point out) it would seem the actual key point was that he prefaced his request for a lawyer with an 'if' clause, and the precedent is that the request must not be "ambiguous or equivocal".

The full quote - "This is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer, dawg, ’cause this is not what’s up." - can be argued to be equivocal. It's a common construction to express a hypothetical, e.g. "well if that's how you feel we should cancel the wedding" etc.

The precedent should really be the other way around. You should treat any reference to wanting a lawyer as legitimate unless unambiguously established to not be.

[0] https://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdf

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

#378

Post by jimbob45 »

nosianu wrote: post #330
jimbob45 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being unnecessarily negative here. You're claiming that the system is broken wherever it could possibly be broken as evidenced by...your own paranoia. If you want to suggest an alternative, you have a captive audience including myself. Otherwise you're just fearmongering to fearmonger.

> as evidenced by...your own paranoia. You just blatantly ignored years and years of news in all media and occasionally even here. Usually I'm against posts making claims without adding a link, but please, this stuff has been all over sooooo many times, and singling out a few random examples doesn't do it justice. You could start with long the Washington Post series about civil asset forfeitures to begin with somethi…

The claims I was responding to were

>not super effective for other reasons (QI; courts - an agent of the state - being overly deferential and siding with the state; etc.).

and

>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.

The claims here are that cop malfeasance against US citizens will go unpunished because courts will pardon the cop under any circumstances, specifically because the "judge and prosecutor" will pardon the cop.

However, judges/prosecutors don't actually find citizens guilty - juries do. Furthermore, the defendant has a direct stake in how the jury is selected via their own attorney during voir dire. Therefore, the claim that judges/prosecutors will specifically pardon the cop doesn't hold water.

Furthermore, the claim that intimidation are coercion are viable strategies for the cops is bold in the face of bodycams during arrest and security cams during interrogation. Those two combined eliminate 99% of a cop's ability to harass or harm a suspect and not face repercussions.

So, the individual made two claims that don't stand up to scrutiny and did not offer an alternative that would solve their claims.

As for your claims of a preponderance of evidence, I've seen only anecdotal evidence over the past few years. The most evidence I've seen of system violence are the BLM riots and the crime statistics showing that African-Americans commit 52% of murders in the US[0].

[0]https://www.informernet.com/opinion/how-to-respond-to-africa...

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

#379

Post by hanniabu »

colechristensen wrote: post #57
LinuxBender wrote: post #20

Sortof off topic question. I've never owned a smart phone but might get one soon assuming I can find a decent one that will run grapheneOS. Is there an app that can be given permission to intercept the unlock code and upon receiving the panic/under duress code, discretely put the phone into a "parental controls" configuration that sandboxes all your data and only presents the storage you want the law enforcement chil…

The correct thing to do if you want your phone not to be searched is to shut it off. The tools used to search phones generally work with unpatched vulnerabilities and you don’t want to do anything that looks like tampering with evidence. When off the encryption of the device will be most effective and resilient to attack because nothing will be unencrypted until you enter your passcode at boot.

Couldn't turning your phone off be seen as tampering with evidence?

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

#380

Post by hungryforcodes »

Sorry-- this is totally unrelated and maybe even inappropriate-- but how do people sort through 300+ comments on HN to consume a topic? I understand that /. introduces bias with its system, but I honestly find myself abandoning alot of deeper HN threads because it's so difficult to parse all the comments. Perhaps I'm missing something.
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