DOJ Gets Warrant to Force People to Use Fingerprints to Unlock Their Phones
As more and more people use encryption to protect their data, surveillance hawks at all levels — local, state, and federal — continue to seek ways around the privacy protections offered by that encryption. A recently published court filing from California shows that the hawks are stooping to new lows in their treatment of the constitutional protections afforded to people’s data.Forbes is reporting on an application for a warrant by U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on May 9, 2016 to allow “law enforcement” officers serving the warrant to “depress the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person who is at located at the subject premises during the execution of the search and who is reasonably believed by law enforcement to be a user of a fingerprint sensor-enabled device that is located at the subject premises and falls within the scope of the warrant.”Although the warrant itself and the other court documents are not available to the public, the memorandum is more than enough to show that the hawks have overstepped any reasonable line of protection in their attempt to get around both the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Since those who have been used to taking the easiest path of mass surveillance see encryption as “a threat to law enforcement efforts” and “a boon to dangerous criminals,” they demonstrate that they are more than willing to sacrifice liberty and privacy to attack that encryption. Never mind that normal, everyday non-criminals use encryption to protect their data from both criminal hackers and overreaching government agents.
Source: DOJ Gets Warrant to Force People to Use Fingerprints to Unlock Their Phones
