Looks like the new iPhone 5S has fingerprint recognition for security. How long before a police officer asks if the fingerprint can be seized for comparison in a criminal case?

Does anyone know if the latest version of the cellabrite can bust through that security? I know the older models were just catching up with the swipe passwords.

It may be that the fingerprint recognition on an iPhone 5S doesn't involve actual storage of the print itself -- on the phone or a separate server. It may be converted to a mathematical result that is stored. Interesting.

Details.

Let's construct a little hypothetical here and see how long it takes to become an appellate case.

There's currently http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/west-allis-encryption-case-delves-into-fifth-amendment-debate-gi9mrag-204772741.html]litigation ongoing as to whether or not compelling a defendant to disclose the password for hard drive encryption is testimonial, and thus a violation of the 5th amendment. There is also a question as to whether or not it's a "search" that reveals something that the government didn't already know- namely that the hard drives belong to the defendant.

We know from DWI caselaw that things like SFSTs are not testimonial because they don't reveal anything other than the defendant's physical state- something that can be observed with ones own eyes. Same thing with having a defendant reveal tattoos to the jury. Not testimonial.

Last SCOTUS term Maryland v. King, in dicta, firmly constitutionalized fingerprinting as part of booking.

New advances in 3D printing make it possible to produce plastic reproductions of a person's fingerpads from high resolution fingerprint scans.

So now the hypo- Dennis Defendant is arrested for sexual assault of a child. He has a new iPhone in his pocket, but denies that it's his, and claims that his friend, Bill Businessman, left it at his house. Dennis is arrested, fingerprinted on a digital fingerprint scanner, and booked into jail. The iPhone is placed into evidence. Irving Investigator knows the local college has a new 3D printer, and wants to play with it. He prints off Dennis' fingerprints, takes the phone out of property, and bam- the right thumb unlocks the phone. The background is an image of Dennis' victim, naked.

All I have to say is that I hope someone else writes this on appeal, because it's coming.

Meanwhile, the defendant has gone online to trigger a remote erasure of all data on the phone, figuring he would much rather face tampering charges than sexual assault.

..except the erase attempt fails because the smart officer put the phone in a tinfoil hat

When you strip away the 3D printing and technology isn't the hypothetical essentially State v. Granville that's currently before the Court of Criminal Appeals? At the very least, I hope that Granville provides some guidance. And sooner rather than later.

More on that:

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This week, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook noting how fundamentally different biometric identifiers are from previous ID methods:

“Passwords are secret and dynamic; fingerprints are public and permanent. If you don’t tell anyone your password, no one will know what it is. If someone hacks your password, you can change it — as many times as you want,” Franken wrote. “Let me put it this way: if hackers get a hold of your thumbprint, they could use it to identify and impersonate you for the rest of your life.”

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