Feds: It's legal to demand fingerprints to unlock phones of everyone in a building
Whether you were in your house, or visiting someone in another house or even an apartment, you would surely not believe that cops could bust in and demand the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person there that they suspected might own a smartphone with a fingerprint sensor. That’s right, not accused of having committed any crime, but of simply owning a smartphone which can be unlocked with fingerprint biometrics. Nevertheless, in what is believed to be a first, that is exactly what a court filing in California asked for.
Federal prosecutors wanted to search a location in Lancaster, California. A May 2016 memorandum in support of a search warrant asked for “authorization to depress the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person” who was at the location so long as law enforcement “reasonably believed” the person used a “fingerprint sensor-enabled device.”
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