Ride the Lightning

Can Police Use a Dead Man’s Finger to Unlock His iPhone? Sometimes.

April 3, 2018

Dead men have no privacy rights. But they can sometimes unlock their iPhones with fingerprint authentication.

As Forbes reported on March 22nd, in November 2016, about seven hours after Abdul Razak Ali Artan had mowed down a group of people in his car, gone on a stabbing spree with a butcher's knife and been shot dead by a police officer on the grounds of Ohio State University, an FBI agent applied the bloodied body's index finger to the iPhone found on the deceased. The cops hoped it would help them access the phone to learn more about the assailant's motives and Artan himself.

Unfortunately, Artan's lifeless fingerprint didn't unlock the device In the hours between his death and the attempt to unlock, when the authorities had to go through legal processes regarding access to the smartphone, the iPhone had gone to sleep and when reopened required a passcode.

But where the FBI's attempt failed, others have succeeded. Separate sources close to local and federal police investigations in New York and Ohio, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to speak on record, said it was now relatively common for fingerprints of the deceased to be depressed on the scanner of Apple iPhones. For instance, the technique has been used in overdose cases, said one source. In such instances, the victim's phone could contain information leading to the dealer.

There are still concerns about whether a warrant should be required. Greg Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Freedom, Security and Technology Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said it's possible in many cases there would be a valid concern about law enforcement using fingerprints on smartphones without any probable cause. "That's why the idea of requiring a warrant isn't out of bounds," Nojeim added.

Are you shocked that police are now looking at how they might use Apple's Face ID facial recognition technology, introduced on the iPhone X? It could provide an easier path into iPhones than Touch ID. Marc Rogers, researcher and head of information security at Cloudflare, told Forbes he'd been looking at Face ID in recent months and had discovered it didn't appear to require the face of a living person to work. While Face ID is supposed to use your attention in combination with natural eye movement, so fake or non-moving eyes can't unlock devices, Rogers found that the technology can be deceived simply using photos of open eyes.

Equally significant, Rogers discovered this was possible from many angles and the phone only seemed to need to see one open eye to unlock. "In that sense it's easier to unlock than Touch ID – all you need to do is show your target his or her phone and the moment they glance it unlocks," he added.

So I won't be surprised if cops hold iPhones up to the faces of the dead, opening their eyes if necessary, to unlock the phones. Creepy, but apparently legal thus far.

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