How police are using corpses to unlock phones
If you’ve ever imagined a scenario where police demand you unlock your phone and thought, “Over my dead body!” — we have bad news for you. Here in our absurd dystopian future, having a phone means that upon your demise you could find yourself participating — limp and lifeless — in a legal search and seizure of your own digital property.
Police in Largo, Florida, recently tried to use a dead man’s finger to open his phone. This was to the complete astonishment of his family and probably also the staff at the Sylvan Abbey Funeral Home. Detectives just rolled right in with Linus F. Phillip’s phone and asked staff where his corpse was. They then attempted to unlock his phone by pressing his hands and fingers on to the fingerprint sensor.
The dead man’s fiancée, Victoria Armstrong, told press, “I just felt so disrespected and violated.”
Mr. Phillip, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed outside a gas station after police claimed he tried to drive away during a search. His death was ruled a “justifiable homicide.” His family does not trust the investigation into his death.
“They were trying to open up that cellphone using a dead man’s finger,” the family’s attorney, John Trevena, said. “That’s disgusting beyond words.”
Attempts by police to use the dead man’s hands for what they claimed was “to preserve evidence” by unlocking his phone were unsuccessful. The alleged evidence on his phone, the press wrote, was “to aid in the investigation into Phillip’s death and a separate inquiry into drugs,” according to Lt. Randall Chaney.
“We can’t remember having unlocked a phone in that fashion, either at the scene, the medical examiner’s office or the funeral home,” Lt. Chaney said.
The Tampa Bay Times wrote:
According to Chaney, there’s a 48- to 72-hour window to access a phone using the fingerprint sensor. Police got the phone back within that window but after the body was released from state custody to the funeral home.
Apparently, we don’t have an expectation of privacy after we die. It sounds diabolical, but damn if it isn’t America’s newest law enforcement trend. They aren’t just playing with your cold, dead hands; they’re using it to access your selfies, dick pics, cat pics, drunk DMs and anime porn search history. I mean, “look for evidence.”
Like it or not, what the police did was legal — and it’s becoming a common practice. In November 2016, FBI agents used the bloody finger belonging to Ohio State University killer Abdul Razak’s iPhone in hopes of finding information and evidence. They got the timing wrong, missing the window before the phone required a passcode and ended up cracking the device with other means.
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