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RTL Post Featured in CloudNine E-Discovery Blog

April 25, 2018

On April 5, Doug Austin of CloudNine featured the Ride the Lightning (RTL) blog post “Can Police Use a Dead Man’s Finger to Unlock His iPhone? Sometimes.” in his own post. His blog post, “Law Enforcement Has Found a New Way to Put a Finger on iPhone Evidence: eDiscovery Trends” is featured in CloudNine’s eDiscovery Daily Blog. CloudNine is a legal intelligence technology company with deep expertise in the analysis, processing, and review of electronically stored information (ESI). Ride the Lightning is an electronic evidence and cybersecurity blog by Sensei’s Sharon Nelson.

Excerpt: A dead finger, that is.  Believe it or not, cops are now opening iPhones with dead people’s fingerprints.
A couple of days ago Sharon Nelson (on her excellent Ride the Lightning blog) covered a Forbes article that discussed a suspect who mowed down a group of people in his car, went on a stabbing spree with a butcher’s knife and was shot dead by a police officer on the grounds of Ohio State University.  To try to access the phone to learn more about the assailant’s motives, an FBI agent applied the bloodied body’s index finger to the iPhone found on the deceased suspect.
In that case, it didn’t work as the iPhone had gone to sleep and when reopened required a passcode.  But, this technique is working in many other cases.  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, devices which have been wrapped up in increasingly powerful encryption over recent years. For instance, the technique has been used in overdose cases, said one source. In such instances, the victim’s phone could contain information leading directly to the dealer.