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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

#451

Post by jandrese »

rootusrootus wrote: post #401
stackbutterflow wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very USian take. There are many countries in the world where people aren't scared to death when police come knock on their door. There are many countries where police officers are actually scared of using their weapon. In these countries it helps to know the law and how to deal with these situations.

I'm not frightened at all when the police come knock on my door. Why do you think that's normal in the US? > There are many countries where police officers are actually scared of using their weapon. I'm curious 1) the countries, and 2) why the officers are afraid.

If every time you fire your weapon you are brought before a review board that treats firearm discharge as a serious matter and may lose your job if you acted in a panic or without reasonable justification then it's going to make you think twice about blasting that perp that maybe twitched his arm when you told him to hand over his driver's license and registration.

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

#452

Post by craftinator »

marcosdumay wrote: post #440
rootusrootus wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The police in the US can point a gun at you and get you to comply, but if you think the courts are going to accept evidence collected while that gun is unholstered, then you definitely don't understand the justice system here. That's probably the single easiest win for a defense attorney in court.

Why do US people always put so much emphasis on never talking to the police? Are you talking only about evidence literally gathered with a gun pointed to your head? If, so, well, my comment wasn't that literal. As a rule, if you have any chance of becoming a suspect, the police here will refuse to interrogate you without your lawyer around, because listening to you can jeopardize their work.

> Why do US people always put so much emphasis on never talking to the police?

There are two classes of damages police can enact on you in the US, both of which makes interacting with them in any capacity dangerous.

The first class is that they can completely ruin or end your life. This includes anything from killing you, leaving you with lifelong injuries or stress disorders, felony charges, etc. Anything that permanently scars your enjoyment of life.

The second class is non permanent, but extremely inconvenient damages. These are very common, take little effort or thought on their part, and ranges from impounding a car, charging you with a misdemeanor, harassing you, taking large sums of cash from your person, disturbing your house or belongings, trespassing you, holding important belongings or documents as evidence, etc.

Either of these classes of damages can be the result of an interaction with police, stemming from saying the "wrong thing", "acting nervous", "acting suspicious", being in the vicinity of a possible crime, being accused of witnessing an event, being too close while they are conducting police business, "making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe", being the victim of a crime, etc.

Each time you speak to police, you risk a chain of events occurring that result in one of these two classes of damages. It's just not worth it. They aren't worth talking to, given some of the possible outcomes.

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

#453

Post by nerdponx »

renaudg wrote: post #386
nerdponx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Fortunately, they didn't realize that Find My iPhone persists through factory resets (nice!). Wouldn't a thief that knows enough to ask you to do a factory reset also know to ask you to disable Find My iPhone ? I mean you're even prompted to do so during the "erase all content & settings" process, right ?

> Wouldn't a thief that knows enough to ask you to do a factory reset also know to ask you to disable Find My iPhone ?

No idea, I guess not! This was several years ago, I think Find My iPhone was relatively new.

> I mean you're even prompted to do so during the "erase all content & settings" process, right ?

I don't remember being prompted.

They might also not have been that smart. In addition to my phone and cash, they took my debit card (I was able to convince them to let me keep my various other cards like driver's license, train pass, etc.) and asked for my PIN, but I just called the company and canceled the card within the hour. They didn't take any of my credit cards, my (admittedly cheap) headphones, or (fortunately) think to check my backpack with my $1000+ work laptop in it.

I figured they were looking for a quick buck, and it was easier/faster/safer to just grab the cash and the phone than to be thorough and risk someone wandering or driving by. I am also very lucky, I know people who've been robbed in that same area and got beaten up pretty badly, even while trying to comply.

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

#454

Post by craftinator »

rootusrootus wrote: post #365
coliveira wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American society created this situation because of its obtuse laws, which give anyone the power to carry guns. In this scenario, police is also forced to have guns and to assume that anyone can have a gun. It is a spiral to hell.

I agree 100%. As someone who owns guns, I don't want to have them taken away. But I don't want criminals to have them. Personally I would give up mine if everyone else did, including the police, but that isn't going to happen. And at this point there are so many guns in the US that I'm not sure what a realistic solution is. Even if we could get past the politics, mass confiscation would probably be ineffective (to ma…

The hard thing about making guns illegal is that criminals will still have them...

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

#455

Post by BingoAhoy »

SauciestGNU wrote: post #412
SavantIdiot wrote: post #326

Lots of posts on here about US folks taking bizarre measures to avoid being harassed by authority: travel with burner phones, not using unusual OSes, not using techniques to record, wiping phones before travel. We're just normalizing a slow roll to a police-state.

Not exactly a slow roll, recently a group of my friends engaged in a sit-in, and the police beat them then charged them with resisting or obstructing causing injury, a 5 year felony because despite not resisting the officers complained of soreness after beating them. I just want to say the police are almost universally monsters, and if you find yourself on a jury where someone is accused of violence against the polic…

Yup I was detained by a police, where he broke my rib, and in car ride over he nonchalantly said consider myself lucky he wasn't pressing charges for me grabbing him. That itself being a remarkably bold lie.

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

#456

Post by SavantIdiot »

giantg2 wrote: post #411
SavantIdiot wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, Portland, Ore. police department are documented white supremacists and clan sympathizers, and there's not many places bluer than PDX. But my last statement is 100% true. There's only one side in the corrupt police debate, regardless of your feelings of "both sides are the same". Show me where the liberal cops standing up for social justice and BLM are hiding, please, I'd love to live in that town.

It's not about standing up for BLM. It's that there can be corrupt liberal cops, or cops supporting liberal ideals in a corrupt manner. One issue that this can be common with is gun rights - people lawfully carrying/owning a firearm who are harassed by police who support the liberal policies related to gun control. This has been a common thing in Philadelphia.

Stop it with the "both sides." Just stop. We're done with that after Trump's nonsense. There is a stark problem facing the US today, and you're trying to obfuscate it with bullshit talking points.

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

#457

Post by chimeracoder »

bleachedsleet wrote: post #376
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.

> 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

Android unfortunately doesn't have anything like this enabled by default, and what it allows you to enable is much more limited.

Lockdown mode[0] has to be enabled manually (it's hidden deep in setting that most people won't notice), and all it does is add an additional soft button when you long-press the power button. That button will disable biometric unlocking and hide notifications, but only until the phone is next unlocked.

Unfortunately, in situations where you might want to use this, long-pressing the button and then having to tap the screen is cumbersome.

To be fair, the third button is the power button, which will turn off the device and is effectively another way of disabling the biometric unlocking. So if you randomly press the top of the screen, you have a 2/3 chance of locking your phone as desired... and a 1/3 chance of calling 911 instead (which may make the situation worse).

https://screenrant.com/android-lockdown-mode-purpose-enable-...

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

#458

Post by syspec »

titzer wrote: post #364
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…

> No, by 5-4 vote. I was curious who voted which way. I was not surprised one bit.

Share?

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

#459

Post by jandrese »

HideousKojima wrote: post #43
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that access has to come from your brain; doesn't it therefore fall under the 5th amendment that you have the right to remain silent and something something self-incrimination? I mean I'm trying to think of other instances of getting access to evidence, and the only things I can think of is companies having to provide certain administrative documentation that may not even be their own. But that's probably me…

Generally speaking a court can compel self-incriminating testimony if they first grant you immunity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witness_immunity Say, for example, you were a low level drug dealer and the court wanted evidence from your phone to convict your boss/supplier/whoever. They could compel you to unlock your phone, but could not use the evidence on it against you , only against your supplier, thanks to t…

It's a risky option to take, as prosecutors will then ignore the immunity agreement and put you in jail anyway. I mean they tried that vs. Bill Cosby even though he had access to high priced lawyers. A regular person would have been screwed.

I think a lot of people have this idea of courts being highly technical and finding cases with precision, but in real life it's a lot more lazy and stupid people trying to avoid having to do work while still getting their job done. A great many miscarriages of justice come down to "the guy didn't want to do the work and lied about it, and nobody wanted to make the effort to verify what he said". There is a pervasive attitude of "that guy must be guilty, even if not this crime then of something, I'm not going to let him go over a mere lack of evidence. Society will be better with him behind bars."

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

#460

Post by andrewxdiamond »

ceejayoz wrote: post #448
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideologically, this is exactly how the US Bill of Rights works. The rights listed in the Bill of Rights are unalienable, natural, and apply regardless of your citizenship status. Of course this is weird from another country’s perspective, but it is the mentality that many Americans take because to us, it is right.

> The rights listed in the Bill of Rights are unalienable, natural, and apply regardless of your citizenship status. It's quite clear this isn't the actual policy of the US, though, given the existence of Guantanamo Bay.

I agree, I think it’s increasing important to separate the “people of the US” from the “US Government.”

The sentiment of the average citizen is much more inline with the ideals of the nation than the Nation itself is

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