Is a teacher/school administrator allowed to force me to decrypt my phone? As in: My phone was just confiscated, but not before I shut it off. If they wanted to look through it without a warrent, can they force me to decrypt it? EDIT: USA is country-of-residency
Public schools are on a shorter legal leash than private schools are, because they must behave like proper governments do and respect the constitutional rights of their charges. (First Amendment rights are much broader in public schools than they are in private schools). Assuming that we're in a public school, a search of your phone is governed by a watered-down version of the 4th Amendment. They may search your phone if they have a reasonable suspicion that there is evidence of a violation of the law or a school rule, but this is passive with respect to you providing information -- if the phone is on, they can snoop around if they have a reasonable suspicion. The 5th Amendment would be relevant to passcodes: they cannot compel you to give up your passcode. If there was plainly-visible evidence of wrongful activity on the phone which they saw, and then you shut the phone down, then analogous to in re Boucher the courts could order you to reveal your password, under the "foregone conclusion" doctrine. However, it's the courts and not the schools who get to make that determination. One way the school could literally force you, bypassing the legal system, would be to physically threaten you, by beating you or threatening you with a gun or whip. Such physical coersion would be a felony, and it is almost inconceivable that they would do that. What they might maybe do is give you a non-physical ultimatum, of the type "decrypt the phone / reveal the password or we will... expel you / fine you / fail you in your English class / not let you go to any more football games / turn the phone over to the police". The question is, what would be legal versus illegal by way of consequences? I know of no constitutional right to attend football games anywhere, so they might well be able to get away with that deprivation. You might have a contractual right to attend games at a private school. With a private school, there is some contractual agreement between the school and you (least likely, assuming you're a minor) or your parents~guardians (most likely). That contract could imply certain rights, such as attending games, and might spell out a procedure for them to terminate that right. If they don't follow the process, they could be in breach of contract. Apart from contractual rights (which probably involve your parents, not you, but also would be considerable, for example the right to attend and be graded fairly in the English class), you have no protected rights. As you can see, the answer has a lot of "it depends" in it. Suppose your public school had a reasonable suspcion that you had engaged in a criminal activity, and might prove that by looking at the phone – which you shut down. They cannot use physical force against you, but they can try to persuade you, by offering you something that you want which they can legally take away – like attending a football game. If they try to deprive you of something that you have a right to, you can sue them to prevent that. However, they can also seek a court order to compel you to reveal the password, and it is certainly not illegal to inform you that if you don't unlock the phone, they will seek a court order. Whether or not the courts will grant the request is not obvious (incidentally, if the device is fingerprint-protected, you are hosed, since forcing a person to prove fingerprints is not against the 5th). If the school can be very specific about having seen criminal evidence, they have a leg to stand on, otherwise you cannot be compelled to testify against yourself (coughing up a password is a form of testifying against yourself).
A fundamental requirement of criminal culpability is intent. Based on the description this whole process is happening after a user has already had their phone seized. If a person was not aware of Signal's hidden files to damage the police's data forensics software, they will not have met the criminal intent requirement, either maliciously or under a criminal negligence theory. None of the prongs of CFAA are strict liability statutes (18 U.S. Code § 1030 &quot;Whoever having knowingly accessed a computer...&quot;), so that would not apply here. If we imagine a person that is aware of all the information from Signal about their app intentionally abusing Cellebrite's package and with intention to cause damage downloads Signal's malicious files to their phone, I think it's an open question whether or not they would be liable under the CFAA. Specifically, 18 U.S. Code § 1030(a)(5)(A) (emphasis mine) Whoever knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; An argument on this could go both ways. On the one hand, the owner of the phone could be found to not have substantially caused the information to be transmitted to a protected computer, as the police were the integral cause for that in executing their warrant. On the other hand, this sort of file could be considered a digital &quot;booby trap,&quot; and booby traps are illegal for essentially this reason, that they have a foreseeable effect of causing harm to people who are lawfully inside a building without the owner's permission. In this case, the owner's trap was sprung by law enforcement but still placed by the owner in order to damage them.
united-states &quot;I know is it illegal for authorities to question a suspect when their lawyer isn’t present&quot; This is not really true, at least in the US. The suspect must explicitly ask for a lawyer. Even saying &quot;Maybe I should talk to a lawyer&quot; (ie Davis v. U.S. (512 U.S. 453 (1994)) isn't enough, they have to say &quot;I want a lawyer&quot;. Until they invoke the right, an officer can question all they want (provided they were informed of these rights, except for certain situations which are relatively complicated. See Miranda Rights). So no, an officer questioning you without a lawyer is neither a crime nor illegal. Once you invoke your Miranda right though, they have to respect that. With or without your lawyer, this is called interrogation. You can filter your responses through a lawyer, or waive your right to a lawyer and answer directly.
Ark. Code 5-60-120 is very clear that the act of intercepting is a crime. Not just &quot;recording and using&quot;, not just &quot;recording&quot;, but intercepting in any way. Specifically: It is unlawful for a person to intercept a wire, landline, oral, telephonic communication, or wireless communication, and to record or possess a recording of the communication unless the person is a party to the communication or one (1) of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to the interception and recording. Intercepting is illegal, therefore it is not &quot;okay&quot;. Perhaps the &quot;sort of a lawyer&quot; was speaking of the probability of getting caught doing it.
It doesn't really require anything beyond your say-so that it is what you say it is; that would be enough to satisfy the requirement for authentication. From there though, as with any evidence, it's going to be up to a jury to decide how much weight to give the evidence. So the more you can show them to prove that the record is real -- and to knock down any questions the opposing party will raise -- the more likely they are to believe it. So if you just bring a printout that looks like it could easily have been forged, the jury may be thinking about that. If you can bring in a data forensics expert to say the document couldn't have been faked, that's probably going to help. Addendum: As a practical matter, I wouldn't expect this to be much of an issue. Unless you're dealing with a savvy opposing party, the authenticity of e-mails seems to be generally assumed. Courts (1) generally assume that parties aren't perpetrating frauds; and (2) are generally run by judges with little to no technical savvy, who don't realize that one could forge an e-mail, let alone all the different ways it could be done. I've personally entered countless e-mail printouts without them being questioned, even though either party could have just gone down into the e-mail thread and changed what the other side had said earlier in the conversation. To avoid the issue, though, it might be that sending the e-mail to a Gmail account would elimimate the question.
There is RIPA which allows a court to force you to divulge a decryption key. The penalty for not doing so is up to two years in prison, five if terrorism is involved. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), Part III, activated by ministerial order in October 2007,[20] requires persons to supply decrypted information and/or keys to government representatives with a court order. Failure to disclose carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail - Wikipedia - Key Disclosure Law Section 49 of Part III of RIPA compels a person, when served with a notice, to either hand over an encryption key or render the requested material intelligible by authorities. Anyone who refuses to decrypt material could face five years in jail if the investigation relates to terrorism or national security, or up to two years in jail in other cases. Controversially, someone who receives a Section 49 notice can be prevented from telling anyone apart from their lawyer that they have received such a notice. - The Register - UK police can now force you to reveal decryption keys - Refuseniks face jail time The act can be read on the government website It describes, for example, grounds for not complying ... 53 3) For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time if— (a) sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and (b) the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
This could be a violation of 18 USC 1030 (and a crime). A number of things go into requirements for conviction under this law. First, it has to be a computer, which is defined as an electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or other high speed data processing device performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions, and includes any data storage facility or communications facility directly related to or operating in conjunction with such device, but such term does not include an automated typewriter or typesetter, a portable hand held calculator, or other similar device Any printer that I have encountered in the past 40 years counts as &quot;a computer&quot;. Second, (2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains—...(C) information from any protected computer; It is highly likely that the person printing has to receive some information from the printer, and respond accordingly so you have your &quot;obtains information&quot; element. Maybe not useful information, but information nevertheless. It also has to be a protected computer, (B) which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States Well, a computer connected to the internet is a protected computer, see US v. Trotter, 478 F.3d 918. Also, the access must be &quot;without authorization or exceeds authorized access&quot;. The law doesn't explain with &quot;without authorization&quot; means, but the latter is defined as to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter If the law were stated in terms of &quot;prohibited access&quot;, meaning &quot;express denial of permission&quot;, and if the computer owner had set the computer to &quot;prohibited access&quot; by default (password protected), there would be no issue -- accessing the computer is prohibited. &quot;Unauthorized&quot; can also mean &quot;has not been explicitly authorized&quot;, i.e. lacking any indication one way or the other. Every computer access is initially unauthorized, until authorization is granted; and re-trying a login after mis-typing a user name (and being denied access) is not a violation of this law. There does not appear to be case law that addresses the status of computers just left open to the public, and whether using a computer that is so exposed constitutes &quot;unauthorized access&quot;. Also, it is not clear that the defendant in this case has &quot;obtained information&quot;, since with printing, information flows into the computer. There is also a clause about recklessly causing damage, but I don't see what damage would result (&quot;damage&quot; is defined as &quot;any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information&quot;), and how printing would be &quot;reckless&quot;. It seems somewhat unlikely that this would be deemed to be a crime, though if you experiment, you could be on the cutting edge of new case law.
A teacher could not instruct students in how to build explosives for use in Federal crimes: It shall be unlawful for any person to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction [...] with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence (source) This Federal statute creates a law preventing the teaching (in any context, including schools) of bombmaking for the purpose of committing a federal crime. So &quot;bombmaking&quot; is one subject that cannot be taught, although I don't think that there have been any prosecutions of regular K12 teachers under this law.