
It’s unconstitutional for cops to force phone unlocking, court rules - pseudolus
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/indiana-supreme-court-its-unconstitutional-to-force-phone-unlocking/
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dmitrygr
Things in this case went wrong a lot earlier. What judge signed off on a
warrant for this fishing expedition? The cops openly admitted they had no idea
what they were looking for in that phone. They just wanted to look around and
see if they find something incriminating.

That is NOT how search warrants are supposed to work. You are supposed to know
exactly what you're looking for and where you intend to find it. You present
that information to a judge to get the warrant. "We just want to rummage
about" is not generally accepted.

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calebkaiser
100%. I feel like this is an area where the technical literacy gap between
generations has the potential to be incredibly damaging. If a judge's
signature is blessing enough for police to take whatever action, and the judge
has very little understanding of computers, there's quite a bit of leeway here
for disaster.

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setr
It seems to me that technical literacy is irrelevant for this purpose -- even
a judge who knows next to nothing about computers should be capable of
thinking: search is search.

Unless they thought of computers/phones as equivalent to a garbage can, I
don't see how the mistake would be made

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phendrenad2
Neat. But this is hardly a settled issue. Each time it comes up, it seems the
court flips a coin to decide the answer.

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mikece
What's shocking is that this even had to go to court in order for it to be
recognized as a 4th Amendment issue (and 1st and 5th... and probably more).

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vinay427
This article is about the Fifth Amendment, and at least as the article
describes them, the different situations and resulting precedents are more
nuanced than your comment seems to imply.

