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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

friendly reminder for those in the USA, or visiting it:

face, blood, fingerprint, and other biometrics on your mobile device are not protected by the 5th amendment and can be secured from your person by force if necessary and compelled by a warrant. If you fail to submit to a DUI test for example, your blood can be forcibly drawn against your consent in the presence of a warrant.

strong passphrases (not passwords) however are vital to your security and protected under the united states 5th amendment. you can be compelled to surrender your device, but not its password.

failure to disclose a password cannot be used as reasonable suspicion to detain you for a crime.

View on HN

Related for iPhone users: if you press and hold the lock and volume up buttons until the "slide to power off" screen appears, FaceID will be disabled until the next successful passcode entry.

You can press "cancel" after the "power off" screen appears, or you can power it off, faceID will be disabled regardless.

Further discussion: https://daringfireball.net/2022/06/require_a_passcode_to_unl...

One can also press the lock button five times which has the same outcome.

iPhone 8 on iOS 13 here. That does not work but holding lock and volume does.

Are there any Android phones with a similar feature?

It's called "lockdown mode" on Android, usually in the power menu. Not quite as good as a pure hardware button flow, but it does exist.

Seems passcode should be obtainable too then, as it is represented in the physical configuration of your brain's biological system and thusly could technically be considered biometrics.

The fed's didn't have much trouble getting a warrant to have my internals x-rayed last time I crossed the border, even though that was all internal configuration of the body.

Nah, we have the right to not self incriminate ourselves. I think blood drawing is over the line, but face and finger scans are non-invasive.

I would argue forcing someone to put their finger on a phone or otherwise provide their physical self in a compulsory manner is self-incrimination. Your body is part of your 'self.'

Physically forcing someone to do something isn't self-anything. If it were, the electric chair would be assisted suicide. You don't even need to be alive to put your finger on a phone.

physically forcing someone to incriminate themselves is self incrimination. Why would it not be self-incrimination once they are forced? Your statement makes zero sense.

The whole point of laws regarding self incrimination is not to stop people from being electively able to incriminate themselves, but to stop the government from being able to force them to incriminate themselves.

Almost everyone but you is familiar with self-incrimination as the word(s) used in modern English as a concept that includes things like testifying against yourself whether you were physically forced to to or not.

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RE to below: (due to timeout)

>Again, the government cannot force people to incriminate themselves.

force : coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence.

>It can threaten people in order to convince them to incriminate themselves,

You literally used an example of force.

In classic HN autistic pedantry, if someone puts a gun to my head and demands my wallet and I hand it over -- well your honor they were never forced to do it! You see they were just threatened to be convinced to hand the wallet over!

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>I really have to bail, because this is stupid. The government can take your wallet. You are not allowed to keep your wallet because the things inside it can incriminate you. By your own tortured reasoning, self-incrimination would include someone else physically holding you down and taking your wallet.

I claimed it (someone compelling you to hand over your wallet) was an example of force, not an example of self-incrimination. Keep your thoughts straight. At least we finally figured out you have no idea what force means, and that was the root of your misunderstandings. For the record, wallet is not part of your 'self' but your finger is generally understood to be. Dead men aren't prosecuted in the US so it's moot to debate handing over a dead man's finger for his own criminal case.

>There's no timeout. It takes a little while for a reply link to appear on the main page, but if you click directly through to the comment, you can reply.

There is a timeout on my account, I'm limited to ~5 posts per 3 hours.

> physically forcing someone to incriminate themselves is self incrimination.

You can't physically force someone to testify. It's not a thing that is possible, unless you kill them and attach electrodes to the muscles of their mouth, throat, and diaphragm. The testimony that results from that method will not be convincing.

> The whole point of laws regarding self incrimination is not to stop people from being electively able to incriminate themselves, but to stop the government from being able to force them to incriminate themselves.

Again, the government cannot force people to incriminate themselves. It can threaten people in order to convince them to incriminate themselves, it can punish people if they refuse to incriminate themselves, but it can't force people to incriminate themselves. It can put their finger on a phone. You can put their finger on a phone, if you're bigger than them, or they are asleep.

The point of laws about self-incrimination is to declare that refusal to self-incriminate cannot be punished.

> RE to below: (due to timeout)

There's no timeout. It takes a little while for a reply link to appear on the main page, but if you click directly through to the comment, you can reply.

> In classic HN autistic pedantry, if someone puts a gun to my head and demands my wallet and I hand it over -- well your honor they were never forced to do it! You see they were just threatened to be convinced to hand the wallet over!

I'm going to take a last run at explaining this to you. I'm not telling you that the government cannot force you to do things. I'm telling you that the government cannot force you to testify against yourself, because that's how justice once worked: you chose somebody you thought did something, then tortured them until they admitted it. This is the beginning and the end of self-incrimination. It doesn't give you the ability to refuse to give your photograph, it doesn't give you the ability to refuse fingerprint or DNA collection. It, in fact, doesn't give you any ability. It restrains the ability of the government to punish you for not testifying against yourself.

> In classic HN autistic pedantry, if someone puts a gun to my head and demands my wallet and I hand it over -- well your honor they were never forced to do it!

I really have to bail, because this is stupid. The government can take your wallet. You are not allowed to keep your wallet because the things inside it can incriminate you. By your own tortured reasoning, self-incrimination would include someone else physically holding you down and taking your wallet.

Nothing can be self-incrimination that doesn't require you to be alive to participate in. Any inability to understand this is willful, and you're only hurting yourself.

If it's a federal crime they'll charge you with conspiracy to commit a crime and you're a felon by default. That's what they did to crypto drug sellers.

Do any of these protections count at the airport/border?

You have 5A rights at the border but I can tell you from firsthand experience after exercising them, I now get tossed in a cell every time I cross including spending 16+ hours in detention. IMO it's best not to have a phone at the border, I don't take anything across the border I don't want destroyed and documented and examined to the Nth degree. If you're not a citizen or green card holder they'll also send you packing for invoking the few constitutional rights you have at the border.

Oddly they have always been incredibly scrupulous in returning money as long as its under the 10k limit, thoroughly counting it in front of me and placing it in chain of custody.

> If you're not a citizen or green card holder they'll also send you packing for invoking the few constitutional rights you have at the border.

Yeah they're not exactly rights if you're penalised for using them.

It's a valid point, which is why I argue you don't really have a right to trial either because the punitive plea-deal system horribly punishes people who attempt to invoke their right to be proven guilty (or not).

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