Google and Apple Won’t Unlock Your Phone, but a Court Can Make You

I&#x27;ll offer my &quot;rag doll testimony&quot; IANAL axiom: re the 5th Amendment (right against compelled self-incrimination) the court can only &quot;compel&quot; your &quot;testimony&quot; insofar as they can manipulate your limp uncooperative body for fingerprints, hair samples, and other non-invasive observations. Anything inside your body, including blood &amp; ideas, is yours to retain as you see fit.<p>Not perfect, but seems generally sensible. Have at it.

Drawing a legal distinction between a password to unlock and a fingerprint to unlock is absurd.<p>Legally, the method of restricting access (physical key, combination safe, fingerprint, password) should have no bearing on whether somebody can be compelled to provide access. A smartphone filled with documents should be legally equivalent to a locked filing cabinet. Either both should be compellable or neither.

Hey Apple&#x2F;Google - add a new feature that allows me to set a second &#x27;wipe phone code&#x27;.

Keep in mind a 4 digit passcode can by cracked in a matter of minutes by a normal powered laptop.

Not related to smart phones, but with some something like GDBE where you can set it up so that two keys are needed (one of which is stored locally, the other provided by the user) to encrypt&#x2F;decrypt, and the local key was deleted, what could the court do? The evidence isn&#x27;t necessarily destroyed, it just cannot be decrypted.

Wow, having a hard time realizing that the fifth amendment doesn&#x27;t apply as much as I think it should...

&gt; <i>Politely asking that you unlock it yourself, and letting you rot in a cell until you do.</i><p>Does anyone know the details of the second part of that sentence? Surely you wouldn&#x27;t be in jail indefinitely until you give the password...