Feds serve warrant demanding fingerprints from all home residents to unlock their phones
Biometric authentication is often positioned by companies like Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft as the Next Big Thing in personal device security. But it offers absolutely no protection against the government, and can be compelled from suspects without raising any Fifth Amendment concerns. This was driven home with a vengeance over the weekend, when a May 2016 warrant application surfaced. The warrant in question seeks permission to:
The document was discovered by Forbes and constitutes a massive fishing expedition — a move admitted to in the warrant application itself, which states the government doesn’t know the identity of the devices or fingerprints it hopes to seize, but that evidence might exist at the target location. According to the Forbes investigation, this warrant was executed and the information in question was seized.
No protection under the Fifth Amendment
Here’s why the Fifth Amendment offers no protection for your fingerprints. The Fifth Amendment is generally viewed to provide security against something you know, but not something you are, or something you have. For example, you cannot suppress factual evidence about your weight, build, or physical description simply because those attributes might be used to tie you to the scene of a crime (and you cannot practically refuse to provide those measurements to an investigator). On the other hand, you can refuse to testify as to the contents of a locked safe or to provide the combination lock if doing so would constitute incriminating evidence against you.
Biometric authentication is often positioned by companies like Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft as the Next Big Thing in personal device security. But it offers absolutely no protection against the government, and can be compelled from suspects without raising any Fifth Amendment concerns. This was driven home with a vengeance over the weekend, when a May 2016 warrant application surfaced. The warrant in question seeks permission to:
[D]epress the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person who is located at the SUBJECT PRESMISES 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. The government seeks this authority because those fingerprints, when authorized by the user of the device, can unlock the device.
The document was discovered by Forbes and constitutes a massive fishing expedition — a move admitted to in the warrant application itself, which states the government doesn’t know the identity of the devices or fingerprints it hopes to seize, but that evidence might exist at the target location. According to the Forbes investigation, this warrant was executed and the information in question was seized.
No protection under the Fifth Amendment
Here’s why the Fifth Amendment offers no protection for your fingerprints. The Fifth Amendment is generally viewed to provide security against something you know, but not something you are, or something you have. For example, you cannot suppress factual evidence about your weight, build, or physical description simply because those attributes might be used to tie you to the scene of a crime (and you cannot practically refuse to provide those measurements to an investigator). On the other hand, you can refuse to testify as to the contents of a locked safe or to provide the combination lock if doing so would constitute incriminating evidence against you.
