slapmonkay
Campaign Veteran
Doubly so if you use a case with a biometric lock. With a case with a keyed lock or a combination lock they might demand (or even get a warrant to compel) you to surrender the key or combination. But they can't compel you to surrender your thumb.
How would one have the grounds to request said warrant in this scenario?
The above is what I quoted and said. Below is what you say.
If a police officer hands you a warrant, duly signed by a judge, are you going to refuse flatly to comply with it? Good way to wind up in handcuffs. Is the warrant valid? If you haven't done anything illegal it probably isn't. But by the time you could challenge it, the search and seizure has already happened.
And that assumes the police don't claim exigent circumstances and skip the warrant.
Laws don't stop criminal activity, they just give an avenue to punish it after it happens.
I can tell you with 100% certainty, that if an officer or anyone where to hand me a warrant telling me to provide a combination or open a locked safe even under threat of arrest for failing to obey I would not submit and I would invoke my right to remain silent. Under the 5th amendment I am not required to provide this information to them. They can take my safe and try and open it themselves but I am under no obligation to give them this information. The Supreme Court has said, a combination - as the “expression of the contents of an individual’s mind” — is protected by the 5th amendment.
Here is a good read:
http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnolog...nt_Password_Protected&slreturn=20120803145739
In Fisher v. United States,[FOOTNOTE 11] Justice Brennan, in a separate opinion addressing the implicit authentication rationale, pointed out that "[a]n individual's books and papers are generally little more than an extension of his person." Now that passwords can literally be an "extension" of a person's body or behavior, it follows that the source of their content deserves protection.
We live in a time when biometric identifiers have been transformed into the means for acknowledging the existence, control, possession and authentication of computer files. As passwords shift from randomly chosen letters and numbers to "pieces of ourselves," we must be mindful that protecting "personal privacy" has always been a key purpose of the Fifth Amendment.
And when brain scans and functional MRIs are adapted to biometric security, we will have come full circle. A password whether drawn from our brains or our palms is still a password. And the choice of method is an expression of the "contents of the mind."