It’s good that they have this, but there are a lot of situations involving cops where it’s not going to be safe to stick your hand in your pocket. I’ll just leave the biometrics off on my devices.

However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking…"

If the precedent is that unlocking the phone is the same category as fingerprint taking, well, what happens if you refuse to be “coerced” into having your prints taken? Even if the legal precedent isn’t fully understood, it looks like the reasoning here isn’t based on whether there was physical force applied, but whether the search required the contents of the person’s mind.

“The general consensus has been that there is more Fifth Amendment protection for passwords than there is for biometrics,” Andrew Crocker, the Surveillance Litigation Director at the EFF, told Gizmodo in a phone interview. “The 5th Amendment is centered on whether you have to use the contents of your mind when you’re being asked to do something by the police and turning over your password telling them your password is pretty obviously revealing what’s in your mind.”

So he was “only” coerced, ie likely verbally abused and lied to (which cops are allowed to do) about the consequences of refusing to unlock, instead of being physically forced. Such freedom.

They collected everything from the US but pretended they could only search comms with at least one non-US party without a warrant (there were no technical barriers to this and Snowden even claimed it would be easy for a low level NSA agent to read the President’s emails). Foreigners may be easier to search without a warrant at the NSA, but using services outside the US gives a greater chance your data isn’t in their database to begin with.

VS Code is arguably similarly dominant. By Stack Overflow survey, it’s around 75% of the IDE market (source https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2023/06/28/so-2023.aspx) while Chrome seems around 65%. It’s a bit apples to oranges because the IDE survey lets you select multiple items, but it’s a very widely used tool. Google and Microsoft both have a lot of closed source crap, and they both copy everything you do to the NSA.

VS Codium exists which takes everything Microsoft out of open source VS Code. But anyway, fuck Google and MS.

Yo mama so ugly…