January 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

The CNIL’s restricted committee imposes a financial penalty of 50 Million euros against GOOGLE LLC
by Claudio Agosti Jan. 21, 2019

Jan. 21, 2019

https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee-imposes-financial-penalty… A me la parte più affascinante sembra essere quella che riporto sotto. perchè è noto che ogni trattamento deve avere un opt-in chiaro e separato; ora c'è da usare questa sentenza come spauracchio vero ogni altro servizio che accorpa tutti i trattamenti in una sola checkbox? Finally, before creating an account, the user is asked to tick the boxes « *I agree to Google’s Terms of Service*» and « *I agree to the processing of my information as described above and further explained in the Privacy Policy*» in order to create the account. Therefore, the user gives his or her consent in full, for all the processing operations purposes carried out by GOOGLE based on this consent (ads personalization, speech recognition, etc.). However, the GDPR provides that the consent is “specific” only if it is given distinctly for each purpose. -- Claudio Agosti, https://facebook.tracking.exposed, @_vecna PGP keybase.io/vecna - Research Associate - DATACTIVE University of Amsterdam https://data-activism.net

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66° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 23 gennaio 2019
by Nexa Media Jan. 21, 2019

Jan. 21, 2019

Nexa Center for Internet and Society Newsletter Se non visualizzi correttamente questo messaggio clicca qui <http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-66> NEXA 66° Nexa Lunch Seminar Mercoledi 23 gennaio 2019, ore 13.00 - 14.00 Politecnico di Torino http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-66 AI Oracle 2081 Speaker Piera Riccio (Politecnico di Torino) This event will be webcast live: http://nexa.polito.it/upcoming-events Quando si parla di tecnologia, automazione, intelligenza artificiale e le loro implementazioni nella nostra realtà quotidiana, è necessario avere una consapevolezza di quale potrà essere *il futuro della società umana*, specialmente per quanto riguarda il mondo del lavoro. Sin dall'antichità, l’essere umano ha consultato oracoli al fine di cercare una guida per l'interpretazione del proprio futuro. Ma se la tecnologia è diventata così intelligente, allora *perché non interpellare l’intelligenza artificiale stessa?* AI Oracle 2081 <https://aioracle.info/> simula una realtà distopica in cui a ogni essere umano verrà assegnato il lavoro ideale, scelto a seconda di alcuni dati sensibili analizzati da un’intelligenza artificiale. Si tratta un’*installazione artistica interattiva *che mira a spronare i visitatori a riflettere su alcune problematiche etiche riguardanti gli eventuali pregiudizi degli algoritmi intelligenti e sulle conseguenze che questi ultimi possano avere nei contesti in cui vengono implementati processi decisionali autonomi. /Ingresso libero - Sarà disponibile un leggero rinfresco per coloro che si saranno registrati su http://lunch66.eventbrite.com entro il 21 gennaio./ BIOGRAFIE - e informazioni supplementari [RICCIO] *Piera RICCIO* ha 22 anni e proviene da San Potito Sannitico, un piccolo paese di montagna in provincia di Caserta. All’età di 19 anni si è trasferita a Torino, iscrivendosi al corso di laurea triennale in Ingegneria del Cinema e dei Mezzi di Comunicazione presso il Politecnico, concludendo il percorso nel 2018. Nell’estate del 2017, è stata intern presso il Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (Harvard University). Da sempre è particolarmente interessata allo sviluppo tecnologico e alle sue possibili intersezioni con altri ambiti della società, infatti è attualmente iscritta al corso di laurea magistrale in ICT for Smart Societies. Letture consigliate e link utili: * Joy Buolamwini, /How I'm fighting bias in algorithms <https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_bias_in_algorithm…>/, (TED Talk). * AI Now 2017, /Report. <https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2017_Report.pdf>/. * Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, /Machine Bias <https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-crimina…>/, ProPublica. * /AI and the future of work <https://www.wired.com/wiredinsider/2018/04/ai-future-work/>/, Wired. * James Vincent, /Google ‘fixed’ its racist algorithm by removing gorillas from its image-labeling tech <https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-re…>/, The Verge. Che cosa sono il Centro Nexa e i cicli di incontri “Mercoledì di Nexa” e “Nexa Lunch Seminar” #lunch66 <https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23lunch66&src=typd> #aioracle <https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23aioracle&src=typd> #ai4art <https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23ai4art&src=typd> Il Centro Nexa su Internet & Società del Politecnico di Torino (Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica) è un centro di ricerca indipendente e interdisciplinare che studia Internet e il suo effetto sulla società. Maggiori informazioni all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/about. Durante i “*Mercoledì di Nexa*”, che si tengono *ogni 2° mercoledì del mese* alle *ore 18 in punto*, il Centro Nexa su Internet e Società apre le sue porte non solo agli esperti e a tutti coloro i quali lavorano con Internet, ma anche a semplici appassionati e cittadini. Il ciclo di incontri intende approfondire, con un linguaggio preciso ma divulgativo, i temi legati alla Rete: motori di ricerca, Creative Commons, social networks, open source/software libero, neutralità della rete, libertà di espressione, privacy, file sharing, big e open data, smart cities e molto altro. Al centro di quasi tutti gli incontri un ospite pronto a dialogare con i direttori del Centro Nexa, il Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin del Politecnico di Torino e il Prof. Marco Ricolfi dell'Università di Torino, nonché lo staff e i Fellows del Centro Nexa. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa, incluso un elenco di tutti i “Mercoledì” passati, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi. Si segnala inoltre che dal maggio 2012 *ogni 4° mercoledì* del mese *dalle ore 13 alle ore 14* il Centro Nexa organizza anche i "*Nexa Lunch Seminar*". Una lista di tutti i “Lunch Seminar” passati è disponibile all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-seminars. See our events calendar <http://nexa.polito.it/events> if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. Responsabile Comunicazione Centro Nexa su Internet & Società: *Francesco Ruggiero*, tel: +39 011 090 7219, Mob: +39 349 1335082, francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it <mailto:francesco.ruggiero@polito.it>. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa e i Nexa Lunch Seminar, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/events. Weekly Events Newsletter. Sign up <http://nexa.polito.it/mailing-lists> to receive this newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here <https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa>. Connect & get involved: Jobs, internships, and more <http://nexa.polito.it/get-involved>.

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'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 21, 2019

Jan. 21, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-s…> Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more. [...]

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Autonomous weapons and the new laws of war -- A technology that may prove hard to restrain
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 19, 2019

Jan. 19, 2019

<https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/19/autonomous-weapons-and-the-ne…> [...] The challenge that modern armed forces, and armsmakers like IAI, are working on is the ability to pick the target out from a field of non-targets. There are two technological developments that make the challenge a timely one. One is that computers are far more powerful than they used to be and, thanks to “machine learning”, getting much more sophisticated in their ability to distinguish between objects. If an iPhone can welcome your face but reject your sibling’s, why shouldn’t a missile be able to distinguish a tank from a school bus? The change is that autonomy in the non-killing aspects of military life is spreading like wildfire. Drones, driverless trucks and crewless submarines are all being used for various purposes, most of them entirely non-lethal. At the British Army’s “Autonomous Warrior” exercise in December 2018, on the wet and windswept training grounds of Salisbury Plain in southern England, military officers showed off autonomous vehicles and aircraft designed to watch enemy lines, evacuate wounded soldiers and deliver supplies over the perilous “last mile” up to the front line. “Think C-3PO,” says one officer, “not the Terminator.” Autonomous vehicles do not have to become autonomous weapons, even when capable of deadly force. The Reaper drones with which America assassinates enemies are under firm human control when it comes to acts of violence, even though they can fly autonomously. Satellite remote control, though, involves a time delay which would matter more were the drones being shot at in an all-out war. Co-operation may be better with humans out of the loop, too. The Pentagon’s out-there-thinking department, DARPA, is working on autonomous attack swarms more like a murmuration of starlings than a formation of fighter-bombers. What human operators could co-ordinate such dynamics? This is not just an issue for the future. One of the advantages that MDBA, a European missile-maker, boasts for its air-to-ground Brimstones is that they can “self-sort” based on firing order. If different planes launch volleys of Brimstones into the same “kill box”, where they are free to do their worst, the missiles will keep tabs on each other to reduce the chance that two strike the same target. Cost is also a factor in armies where trained personnel are pricey. “The thing about robots is that they don’t have pensions,” says General Sir Richard Barrons, one of Britain’s most senior commanders until 2016. Nor do they have dependents. The loss of a robot is measured in money and capability, not human potential. If keeping a human in the loop was merely a matter of spending more, it might be deemed worthwhile regardless. But human control creates vulnerabilities. It means that you must pump a lot of encrypted data back and forth. What if the necessary data links are attacked physically—for example with anti-satellite weapons—jammed electronically or subverted through cyberwarfare? Future wars are likely to be fought in what America’s armed forces call “contested electromagnetic environments”. The Royal Air Force is confident that encrypted data links would survive such environments. But air forces have an interest in making sure there are still jobs for pilots; this may leave them prey to unconscious bias. The vulnerability of communication links to interference is an argument for greater autonomy. But autonomous systems can be interfered with, too. The sensors for weapons like Brimstone need to be a lot more fly than those required by, say, self-driving cars, not just because battlefields are chaotic, but also because the other side will be trying to disorient them. Just as some activists use asymmetric make-up to try to confuse face-recognition systems, so military targets will try to distort the signatures which autonomous weapons seek to discern. Paul Scharre, author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War”, warns that the neural networks used in machine learning are intrinsically vulnerable to spoofing. Judgment day New capabilities, reduced costs, resistance to countermeasures and the possibility of new export markets are all encouraging R&D in autonomous weapons. To nip this in the bud, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is calling for a pre-emptive ban on “fully autonomous” weapons. The trouble is that there is little agreement on where the line is crossed. Switzerland, for instance, says that autonomous weapons are those able to act “in partial or full replacement of a human in the use of force, notably in the targeting cycle”, thus encompassing Harop and Brimstone, among many others. Britain, by contrast, says autonomous weapons are only those “capable of understanding higher level intent and direction”. That excludes everything in today’s arsenals, or for that matter on today’s drawing boards. Partly in order to sort these things out, in 2017 the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons formalised its earlier discussions of the issues by creating a group of governmental experts (GGE) to study the finer points of autonomy. As well as trying to develop a common understanding of what weapons should be considered fully autonomous, it is considering both a blanket ban and other options for dealing with the humanitarian and security challenges that they create. Most states involved in the convention’s discussions agree on the importance of human control. But they differ on what this actually means. In a paper for Article 36, an advocacy group named after a provision of the Geneva conventions that calls for legal reviews on new methods of warfare, Heather Roff and Richard Moyes argue that “a human simply pressing a ‘fire’ button in response to indications from a computer, without cognitive clarity or awareness” is not really in control. “Meaningful control”, they say, requires an understanding of the context in which the weapon is being used as well as capacity for timely and reasoned intervention. It also requires accountability. Lieutenant-colonel Richard Craig, who leads the British Army HQ’s research on autonomous systems, agrees that context is crucial. In some contexts it might be right to vet every target. In others it is sufficient to understand the threat and act accordingly. For example a Phalanx system, he says, “wouldn’t be in fully autonomous mode unless there was a high threat. Meaningful human control is to turn it on into that mode, and then to turn it off”. This means that future robot warplanes, such as those being explored by the French-led nEUROn programme and Britain’s Taranis, both of which are experimenting with automatic target recognition, present the biggest challenge. Long-legged as they are, they may encounter a wide range of target environments that could be hard to anticipate. They could be in or out of meaningful human control depending on where they end up, the competence and experience of the operators, what is likely to step into their path and, potentially, changes to their algorithms made through on-board machine learning. A field day for ethicists; a nightmare for the would-be treaty-makers. The two dozen states that want a legally binding ban on fully autonomous weapons are mostly military minnows like Djibouti and Peru, but some members, such as Austria, have diplomatic sway. None of them has the sort of arms industry that stands to profit from autonomous weapons. They ground their argument in part on International Humanitarian Law (IHL), a corpus built around the rules of war laid down in the Hague and Geneva conventions. This demands that armies distinguish between combatants and civilians, refrain from attacks where the risk to civilians outweighs the military advantage, use no more force than is proportional to the objective and avoid unnecessary suffering. When it comes to making distinctions, Vincent Boulanin and Maaike Verbruggen, experts at SIPRI, note that existing target-recognition systems, for all their recent improvement, remain “rudimentary”, often vulnerable to bad weather or cluttered backgrounds. Those that detect humans are “very crude”. And this is before wily enemies try to dupe the robots into attacking the wrong things. Necessity and proportionality, which requires weighing human lives against military aims, are even more difficult. “However sophisticated new machines may be, that is beyond their scope,” says Major Kathleen McKendrick of the British army. An army that uses autonomous weapons needs to be set up so as to be able to make proportionality decisions before anything is fired. Salvation? More broadly, IHL is shaped by the “Martens clause”, originally adopted in the Hague convention of 1899. This says that new weapons must comply with “the principles of humanity” and “dictates of public conscience”. Bonnie Docherty of Human Rights Watch, the NGO which co-ordinates the anti-robot campaign, argues that, “As autonomous machines, fully autonomous weapons could not appreciate the value of human life and the significance of its loss...They would thus fail to respect human dignity.” A strong argument, but hardly legally watertight; other philosophies are available. As for the dictates of public conscience, research and history show that they are more flexible than a humanitarian would wish. Leaving aside law and ethics, autonomous weapons could pose new destabilising risks. Automatic systems can interact in seemingly unpredictable ways, as when trading algorithms cause “flash crashes” on stockmarkets. Mr Scharre raises the possibility of a flash war caused by “a cascade of escalating engagements”. “If we are open to the idea that humans make bad decisions”, says Peter Roberts, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, “we should also be open to the idea that AI systems will make bad decisions—just faster.” Beyond the core group advocating a ban there is a range of opinions. China has indicated that it supports a ban in principle; but on use, not development. France and Germany oppose a ban, for now; but they want states to agree a code of conduct with wriggle room “for national interpretations”. India, which chaired the GGE, is reserving its position. It is eager to avoid a repeat of nuclear history, in which technological have-nots were locked out of game-changing weaponry by a discriminatory treaty. At the far end of the spectrum a group of states, including America, Britain and Russia, explicitly opposes the ban. These countries insist that existing international law provides a sufficient check on all future systems—not least through Article 36 reviews, which they say should be taken more seriously rather than ducked, as some countries do today. They argue that the law should not be governed by the shortcomings of current systems when it comes to, say, discrimination. Some even argue that autonomous weapons might make war more humane. Human warriors break the IHL rules. Properly programmed robots might be unable to. Samsung’s SGR-A1 sentry gun, which used to be deployed in the DMZ, could recognise hands being thrown to the air and weapons to the ground as signs of surrender that meant do not shoot. All sorts of similar context-sensitive IHL-based restraint might be written into its descendants’ programming. But how long until an embattled army decided to loosen such tethers and let slip the robodogs of war? Which brings back one of the biggest problems that advocates of bans and controls have to face. Arms control requires verification, and this will always be a vexed issue when it comes to autonomy. “The difference between an MQ-9 Reaper and an autonomous version is software, not hardware,” says Michael Horowitz of the University of Pennsylvania. “It would be extremely hard to verify using traditional arms-control techniques.” The urge to restrict the technology before it is widely fielded, and used, is understandable. If granting weapons ever more autonomy turns out, in practice, to yield a military advantage, and if developed countries see themselves in wars of national survival, rather than the wars of choice they have waged recently, past practice suggests that today’s legal and ethical restraints may fall away. States are likely to sacrifice human control for self-preservation, says General Barrons. “You can send your children to fight this war and do terrible things, or you can send machines and hang on to your children.” Other people’s children are other people’s concern.

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"Japan seeks to ban global tech giants from using content contained in emails and other data"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 19, 2019

Jan. 19, 2019

*Japan seeks to ban global tech giants from using content contained in emails and other data* The communications ministry plans to prohibit global information technology giants from using email content and other communications data without users’ consent, informed sources said Friday. [...] continua qui: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/19/national/japan-ban-global-tech…

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Call for abstracts // Utopias for a digital society - essay competition
by Francesco Ruggiero Jan. 18, 2019

Jan. 18, 2019

Dear all, I would like to share the following call for abstracts with you. The essay competition twentyforty – utopias for a digital society <http://hiig.de/twentyforty> is a project of the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) <https://www.hiig.de/> and the EU HUB within the Network of Centers <https://networkofcenters.net/>. They invite researchers from around the globe to develop thought-provoking utopias for a digital society. In a first step, They ask for short abstracts of 1,000 words. Ten authors will be invited to Berlin for a one-week writing sprint (full expenses covered) and the essays will be published in an edited volume. Feel free to share it within your network. Francesco -- Francesco Ruggiero Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino web: http://nexa.polito.it mail: francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it tel: 011 090 7219

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Abolish Silicon Valley
by Giacomo Jan. 17, 2019

Jan. 17, 2019

Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime. Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide. ... The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation. https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

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Conferenza CDPD 2019 | 30 gennaio 2019, Bruxelles
by Francesco Ruggiero Jan. 17, 2019

Jan. 17, 2019

Carissimi, vi segnalo che il Centro Nexa parteciperà alla conferenza CDPD 2019 <https://www.cpdpconferences.org/>in qualità di Conference Partner e di organizzatore del panel "*How adequacy mechanism works: Progress in EU's governance of cross-border data flows?".* Il panel, co-organizzato con l'Università degli Studi di Torino, avrà luogo venerdì *30 gennaio* alle ore 16, nell'*Area 42 Grand*, Rue des Palais 46, Brussels. Sarà presieduto da *Ugo Pagallo* (Nexa Center and University of Turin) e moderato da *Bojana Bellamy* (Centre for Information Policy Leadership); interverranno *Jos Dumortier *(TimeLex), *Kristina Irion* (University of Amsterdam), *Ralf Sauer *(European Commission), *Fumio Shimpo* (Keio University). Maggiori informazioni sono disponibili alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/cpdp19 Programma completo: https://www.cpdpconferences.org/ -- Francesco Ruggiero Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino web: http://nexa.polito.it mail: francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it tel: 011 090 7219

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"Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 16, 2019

Jan. 16, 2019

*Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism* /By Nicholas Carr/ JANUARY 15, 2019 I. The Resurrection WE SOMETIMES FORGET that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment capital along with the savings of many Americans. Trophy startups like Pets.com, Webvan, and Excite@Home, avatars of the so-called New Economy, were punch lines. Disillusioned programmers and entrepreneurs were abandoning their Bay Area bedsits and decamping. Venture funding had dried up. As a business proposition, the information superhighway was looking like a cul-de-sac. Today, less than 20 years on, everything has changed. The top American internet companies are among the most profitable and highly capitalized businesses in history. Not only do they dominate the technology industry but they have much of the world economy in their grip. Their founders and early backers sit atop Rockefeller-sized fortunes. Cities and states court them with billions of dollars in tax breaks and other subsidies. Bright young graduates covet their jobs. Along with their financial clout, the internet giants hold immense social and cultural sway, influencing how all of us think, act, and converse. Silicon Valley’s Phoenix-like resurrection is a story of ingenuity and initiative. It is also a story of callousness, predation, and deceit. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise — what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting. [...] continua qui: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-how-google-and-fa…

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No forced facial recognition to unlock phones: judge
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 16, 2019

Jan. 16, 2019

Cosa avrebbe detto il giudice se i dati fossero stati cifrati sul dispositivo e non accessibili presso il provider? Vedremo cosa dirà la corte suprema... <https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/15/government-cant-force-people-to-unlo…> [] The Oakland judge said allowing authorities to force citizens to unlock devices via biometric features in this case would violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search. The government’s request for intrusion into seized devices was too broad because it targeted anyone at the Oakland location believed to be a user of a seized device and wasn’t limited to the two suspects, Westmore said. Permitting forced biometric unlocking in this case would also break the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, Westmore said, noting that courts have ruled that people can’t be forced to reveal a numeric passcode to a device. “While the Court sympathizes with the Government’s interest in accessing the contents of any electronic devices it might lawfully seize, there are other ways that the Government might access the content that do not trample on the Fifth Amendment,” Westmore wrote. Authorities could seek Messenger communications from Facebook, with a warrant if need be, she suggested. “While it may he more expedient to circumvent Facebook, and attempt to gain access by infringing on the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination, it is an abuse of power and is unconstitutional,” Westmore wrote. Law enforcement agencies routinely obtain data from seized devices by getting subpoenas, warrants and court orders compelling tech firms to divulge information. Police also use software to break into seized devices they have a warrant to search. But the government can’t force citizens to use any biometric features to unlock devices, Westmore ruled. “The Government may not compel or otherwise utilize fingers, thumbs, facial recognition, optical/iris, or any other biometric feature to unlock electronic devices,” she said in her Jan. 10 decision. []

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