A 24-year-old murder suspect in the UK was sentenced to 14 months in prison on Friday for refusing to hand over his Facebook account password to detectives who are investigating the death of 13-year-old schoolgirl.
Stephen Nicholson, a friend of the girl's family, was allegedly in contact with the girl on Facebook the morning of her disappearance. Police took him into custody and asked him – twice – for his password so they could check out the alleged conversation and whatever other content might help the investigation.
Nicholson has been jailed not for the murder, but for his refusal to cooperate with the detectives and let them into his account.
As he serves his jail term with his password safely hidden from detectives, Stephen Nicholson will not be helping to bring anybody that justice. But as legal firm Saunders Law pointed out to the Independent, that could be a self-protecting course for him to take: if disclosure of his Facebook password led to incriminating data, the 14 months jail time for his RIPA offense might look like chump change in comparison to what such incriminating data might lead to.
In contrast with the UK’s RIPA and Terrorism Act, the US has a patchwork of laws governing password disclosure. Judges can and do order disclosure, such as in the case of a former sergeant of the Philadelphia Police Department is Francis Rawls accused of storing child abuse images who is in jail indefinitely, until he lets authorities into his hard drive.
The legal landscape in the US seems to change by the minute, though. Within the past two weeks, a Court of Appeals ruled that forcing a woman to unlock her iPhone violates Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, for example.
The ongoing legal debate keeps getting swatted from one end of Fifth Amendment interpretation to the other, as in: Is a password something we know, which would be protected versus a fingerprint, which is something we are, and hence isn’t? And are files on a phone, or content within a Facebook post, similar to paper files in a cabinet, the unlocking of which the authorities can compel? (Naked Security, September 4, 2018)
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And now for something completely uncalled for...
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