Two civil-liberties groups are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on an increasingly relevant digital-privacy question: Do Americans have a constitutional right to keep their passwords and passcodes secret?
It’s a thorny legal issue, and one that is unsettled in the U.S., according to lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who on Thursday filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to decide the matter once and for all.
It’s the latest twist in a tug of war between technology companies, which have radically increased the security of their products over the past decade, and law enforcement authorities, who have increasingly relied on digital evidence to make their cases.
Five years ago, the Justice Department tried to compel Apple Inc to develop a way for law enforcement to access locked iPhones, but it later abandoned the quest. Today, investigators rely on private companies that essentially hack into the phones as a way to uncover the data inside.
Most states haven’t decided the password matter, said Jennifer Granick, a lawyer with the ACLU. So while U.S. law is clear that the police can’t force suspects to divulge a safe combination, for example, that’s not the case when it comes to an iPhone passcode. “It’s ambiguous almost everywhere,” she said.
