On Q Professional Investigations

Silicon Valley’s smartphone snitching has come to an end. Apple and Google have promised that the latest versions of their mobile operating systems make it impossible for them to unlock encrypted phones, even when compelled to do so by the government. But if the Department of Justice can’t demand that its corporate friends unlock your phone, it may have another option: Politely asking that you unlock it yourself, and letting you rot in a cell until you do.

In many cases, the American judicial system doesn’t view an encrypted phone as an insurmountable privacy protection for those accused of a crime. Instead, it’s seen as an obstruction of the evidence-gathering process, and a stubborn defendant or witness can be held in contempt of court and jailed for failing to unlock a phone to provide that evidence.

With Apple and Google no longer giving law enforcement access to customers’ devices, those standoffs may now become far more common. “You can expect to see more cases where authorities are thwarted by encryption, and the result is you’ll see more requests that suspects decrypt phones themselves,” says Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And by requests, I mean demands. As in, you do it or you’ll be held in contempt of court.”

In some cases, the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination may block such demands, under the argument that forcing defendants to unlock their phone would compel them to testify to their own guilt. But the few cases where suspects have pleaded the Fifth to avoid decrypting a PC—the legal equivalent of a smartphone—have had messy, sometimes contradictory outcomes. “This is not a settled question,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor at the University of Maryland Law School. And it likely won’t be, he says, until more appeals courts or the Supreme Court consider the issue.

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WJLA/AP/CNN/ABC News) – The search for missing University of Virginia student Hannah Graham now includes the use of an aerial drone — the first time, according to authorities, one has been used in the search for a missing person in the state of Virginia.

The addition of the drone to the search effort comes more than two weeks after Graham disappeared from Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall area.

The drone has a high-quality camera, and it will “look closer” at objects of interest, said John Coggin, chief engineer of the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership and one of the members of the team operating the drone.

As the drone worked from overhead Wednesday, more than 50 law enforcement personnel participated in the ground search of an area.

Police still aren’t saying much at all about their evidence against the suspect in Graham’s disappearance, but they seem to be working systematically to link his DNA to an expanding circle of attacks on women, a criminal defense expert suggested.

Between searches of Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr.’s car and apartment and his arrest on a charge of abducting Graham last week, police had ample opportunity to obtain genetic evidence connecting him to multiple attacks, said Steve Benjamin, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Matthew’s lawyer, James Camblos, said he met with his client for about 2½ hours earlier this week, but still doesn’t know what evidence police have.

Already, police said they have linked Matthew via DNA to Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington’s 2009 death, and previously, authorities had said DNA in Harrington’s case was connected to a 2005 abduction and sexual assault in Fairfax City.

At least two additional sheriffs’ offices in Virginia – Campbell County and Montgomery County – said they are now reviewing old murder cases to see if they are connected to Matthew.

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Social-media users, beware — that next Facebook “poke” could be from a process server.

In a groundbreaking court ruling, a Staten Island man got permission to use Facebook to serve his ex-wife legal notice that he doesn’t want to pay any more child support.

A Family Court official ruled that Noel Biscocho could use Facebook to serve Anna Maria Antigua because other, more traditional methods to slap her with papers have not worked.

Staten Island Support Magistrate Gregory Gliedman noted in his Sept. 12 order that it was the first of its kind in New York, and also the first in the United States that didn’t involve an attempt to serve someone overseas.

Seeking to cancel his court-ordered $440-a-month child support based on their son having turned 21, Biscocho, in a July 6 affidavit, said he tried to reach his ex at her home, but was told that Antigua had moved out with no forwarding address.

A Google search also proved fruitless, and neither his son nor the couple’s daughter, 22, returned messages.

But Biscocho noted that Antigua “maintains an active social media account with Facebook” — and had even “liked” some photos posted on Facebook by Biscocho’s second wife “as recently as July.”

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