In this article, we plan to discuss the Fifth Amendment implications of requirements to digitally identify oneself, for example by facial or thumbprint recognition.
The spread of data-encryption services has made the retrieval of information more difficult for law enforcement officials. Over half the attempts the FBI made to unlock devices in 2017, for example, were thwarted by encryption. As such investigatory bodies would have it, the government could simply compel a suspect to hand over the password. Their biggest obstacle, however, remains to be the Fifth Amendment.
Fifth Amendment jurisprudence has come to bear on this issue in the past decade, yet remains somewhat unsettled. Back in 1975, Fisher v. United States set a foundation for the issue. The case involved the IRS attempting to compel the defendants to give up certain documents, which they refused on the grounds that they would be incriminating themselves, and were protected by the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled that the Fifth Amendment’s words: “[n]o person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” only protect a suspect from having to communicate incriminating testimonialevidence, and that the production of that case’s physical evidence wouldn’t compel the person to “restate, repeat or affirm the truth of it.” The Court later fleshed out the term testimonial in a case regarding the subpoena of bank records and said that it’s “[t]he contents of an individual’s mind [that] fall squarely within the protection of the Fifth Amendment.” Generally, the courts don’t protect people from having to produce physical evidence, which is not considered “testimony” or the “contents of an individual’s mind.”