Opinion ID: 4543336
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The act of producing an unlocked smartphone

Text: communicates a breadth of factual information. Giving law enforcement an unlocked smartphone communicates to the State, at a minimum, that (1) the suspect knows the password; (2) the files on the device exist; and (3) the suspect possesses those files. This broad spectrum of communication is entitled to Fifth Amendment protection Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 5 of 18 unless the State can show that it already knows this information, making it a foregone conclusion. We make these determinations after carefully reviewing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent that has created and evaluated both the act of production doctrine and its accompanying foregone conclusion exception. Our starting point is Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391 (1976). There, the IRS subpoenaed several taxpayers’ documents that accountants prepared and the taxpayers’ attorneys possessed. Id. at 394–96. The attorneys responded that complying with the subpoenas would violate their clients’ rights against self-incrimination. Id. at 395–96. 2 The Court disagreed. Id. at 414. In reaching that conclusion, Fisher considered what, if any, incriminating testimony would be compelled by responding to a documentary summons. Id. at 409. It was here that the Court created the act of production doctrine: producing documents in response to a subpoena can be testimonial if the act concedes the existence, possession, or authenticity of the documents ultimately produced. Id. at 410. But when the government can show that it already knows this information, then the testimonial aspects of the act are a “foregone conclusion,” id. at 411, and complying with the subpoena becomes a question “not of testimony but of surrender,” id. (quoting In re Harris, 221 U.S. 274, 279 (1911)). This was the situation in Fisher—the Government knew who possessed the tax documents, and it could independently confirm the documents’ existence and authenticity through the accountants who prepared them. Id. at 412– 13. So, the Court narrowly held that “compliance with a summons directing the taxpayer to produce the accountant’s documents involved in 2 Fisher recognized that compelling the attorneys to hand over the documents did not “implicate whatever Fifth Amendment privilege the taxpayer might have enjoyed from being compelled to produce them himself.” 425 U.S. at 402. But because the taxpayers had transferred the documents for legal advice protected by the attorney–client privilege, id. at 403–04, the Court addressed whether the Government could have compelled the taxpayers themselves to produce the documents, id. at 405. Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 6 of 18 these cases” did not implicate incriminating testimony within the Fifth Amendment’s protection. Id. at 414. Fisher was the first, and only, Supreme Court decision to find that the testimony implicit in an act of production was a foregone conclusion. In contrast, the government failed to make that showing in the other two relevant decisions: United States v. Doe, 465 U.S. 605 (1984) (Doe I) and United States v. Hubbell, 530 U.S. 27 (2000). In Doe I, the Government served five subpoenas commanding a business owner to produce certain documents. 465 U.S. at 606–07. He refused, arguing that complying with the subpoenas would violate his right against self-incrimination. Id. at 607–08. The District Court agreed, finding that compliance would compel the business owner “to admit that the records exist, that they are in his possession, and that they are authentic.” Id. at 613 & n.11. The Doe I Court affirmed the District Court’s finding “that the act of producing documents would involve testimonial self-incrimination.” Id. at 613–14. The Court then explained that the Government was not foreclosed from producing “evidence that possession, existence, and authentication were a ‘foregone conclusion,’” but that it had “failed to make such a showing.” Id. at 614 n.13 (quoting Fisher, 425 U.S. at 411). Similarly, the Court in Hubbell found that the foregone conclusion exception did not apply. 530 U.S. at 44. There, the Government served a subpoena requesting a vast array of documents. Id. at 31. In response, Hubbell produced 13,120 pages; and he was later indicted based on information gleaned from their contents. Id. In finding that Hubbell’s compliance with the subpoena violated his right against selfincrimination, the Court rejected two of the Government’s arguments. Hubbell first refused to equate the physical act of handing over the documents with the testimony implicit in the act. Id. at 40–41. The Court agreed that the testimonial aspect of responding to a documentary summons “does nothing more than establish the existence, authenticity, and custody of items that are produced.” Id. But it rebuffed the Government’s “anemic view” of the act of production as a “simple Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 7 of 18 physical act.” Id. at 43. The Court explained that a physical act, nontestimonial in character, cannot be “entirely divorced from its ‘implicit’ testimonial aspect.” Id. Hubbell also rejected the Government’s argument that, under Fisher, “the existence and possession of such records by any businessman is a ‘foregone conclusion.’” Id. at 44. The Court referred to Fisher’s unique context and explained, “Whatever the scope of this ‘foregone conclusion’ rationale, the facts of this case plainly fall outside of it.” Id. Unlike in Fisher, the Hubbell Court reasoned that, because the Government failed to show “it had any prior knowledge of either the existence or the whereabouts of the . . . documents ultimately produced,” the foregone conclusion exception did not apply. Id. at 45. Fisher, Doe I, and Hubbell establish that the act of producing documents implicitly communicates that the documents can be physically produced, exist, are in the suspect’s possession, and are authentic. And this trilogy of Supreme Court precedent further confirms that the foregone conclusion exception must consider these broad communicative aspects. See Commonwealth v. Davis, 220 A.3d 534, 547 (Pa. 2019) (recognizing that “the Supreme Court has made, and continues to make, a distinction between physical production and testimonial production”), petition for cert. filed (U.S. Apr. 20, 2020) (No. 19-1254). In this way, the act of production doctrine links the physical act to the documents ultimately produced. See Laurent Sacharoff, What Am I Really Saying When I Open My Smartphone? A Response to Orin S. Kerr, 97 Tex. L. Rev. Online 63, 68 (2019). And the foregone conclusion exception relies on this link by asking whether the government can show it already knows the documents exist, are in the suspect’s possession, and are authentic. Id. True, the documents’ contents are not protected by the Fifth Amendment because the government did not compel their creation. See Doe I, 465 U.S. at 611–12; Fisher, 425 U.S. at 409–10. But the specific documents “ultimately produced” implicitly communicate factual assertions solely through their production. See Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 36 & n.19, 45. When extending these observations to the act of producing an unlocked smartphone, we draw two analogies. First, entering the password to Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 8 of 18 unlock the device is analogous to the physical act of handing over documents. Sacharoff, supra, at 68. And second, the files on the smartphone are analogous to the documents ultimately produced. Id. Thus, a suspect surrendering an unlocked smartphone implicitly communicates, at a minimum, three things: (1) the suspect knows the password; (2) the files on the device exist; and (3) the suspect possessed those files. 3 And, unless the State can show it already knows this information, the communicative aspects of the production fall within the Fifth Amendment’s protection. Otherwise, the suspect’s compelled act will communicate to the State information it did not previously know— precisely what the privilege against self-incrimination is designed to prevent. See Couch v. United States, 409 U.S. 322, 328 (1973). This leads us to the following inquiry: has the State shown that (1) Seo knows the password for her iPhone; (2) the files on the device exist; and (3) she possessed those files? II. The foregone conclusion exception does not apply. As discussed above, compelling Seo to unlock her iPhone would implicitly communicate certain facts to the State. And for those communicative aspects to be rendered nontestimonial, the State must establish that it already knows those facts. Even if we assume the State has shown that Seo knows the password to her smartphone, the State has failed to demonstrate that any particular 3 The majority of courts to address the scope of testimony implicated when a suspect is compelled to produce an unlocked smartphone have reached a similar conclusion. See State v. Trant, No. 15-2389, 2015 WL 7575496, at –3 (D. Me. Oct. 27, 2015); Sec. & Exch. Comm’n v. Huang, No. 15-269, 2015 WL 5611644, at –4 (E.D. Penn. Sept. 23, 2015); Pollard v. State, 287 So. 3d 649, 656–57 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2019), reh’g denied; G.A.Q.L. v. State, 257 So. 3d 1058, 1061–65 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2018); People v. Spicer, 125 N.E.3d 1286, 1290–92 (Ill. App. Ct. 2019); In re Grand Jury Investigation, 88 N.E.3d 1178, 1180–82 (Mass. App. Ct. 2017); cf. United States v. Wright, 431 F. Supp. 3d 1175, 1186–88 (D. Nev. 2020); In re Search Warrant Application for Cellular Tel. v. Barrera, 415 F. Supp. 3d 832, 838 n.2 (N.D. Ill. 2019); In re Residence in Oakland, Cal., 354 F. Supp. 3d 1010, 1016 (N.D. Cal. 2019); In re Application for a Search Warrant, 236 F. Supp. 3d 1066, 1073 (N.D. Ill. 2017); State v. Diamond, 905 N.W.2d 870, 875 (Minn. 2018). Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 9 of 18 files on the device exist or that she possessed those files. Detective Inglis simply confirmed that he would be fishing for “incriminating evidence” from the device. He believed Seo—to carry out the alleged crimes—was using an application or internet program to disguise her phone number. Yet, the detective’s own testimony confirms that he didn’t know which applications or files he was searching for: There are numerous, and there’s probably some that I’m not even aware of, numerous entities out there like Google Voice and Pinger and Text Now and Text Me, and I don’t know, I don’t have an all-encompassing list of them, however if I had the phone I could see which ones she had accessed through Google. In sum, law enforcement sought to compel Seo to unlock her iPhone so that it could then scour the device for incriminating information. And Seo’s act of producing her unlocked smartphone would provide the State with information that it does not already know. But, as we’ve explained above, the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against compulsory selfincrimination prohibits such a result. Indeed, to hold otherwise would sound “the death knell for a constitutional protection against compelled self-incrimination in the digital age.” Commonwealth v. Jones, 117 N.E.3d 702, 724 (Mass. 2019) (Lenk, J., concurring); see also Davis, 220 A.3d at 549 (“[T]o apply the foregone conclusion rationale in these circumstances would allow the exception to swallow the constitutional privilege.”). Though the foregone conclusion exception does not apply to these facts, this case underscores several reasons why the narrow exception may be generally unsuitable to the compelled production of any unlocked smartphone. We discuss three concerns below. Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 10 of 18 III. This case highlights concerns with extending the limited foregone conclusion exception to the compelled production of an unlocked smartphone. Extending the foregone conclusion exception to the compelled production of an unlocked smartphone is concerning for three reasons: such an expansion (1) fails to account for the unique ubiquity and capacity of smartphones; (2) may prove unworkable; and (3) runs counter to U.S. Supreme Court precedent. We address each in turn. A. The compelled production of an unlocked smartphone is unlike the compelled production of specific business documents. Smartphones are everywhere and contain everything. They have become such “a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 385 (2014); see also City of Ontario v. Quon, 560 U.S. 746, 760 (2010). Indeed, a 2019 report from the Pew Research Center revealed that 81% of Americans own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011. 4 The Supreme Court in Fisher (1976), Doe I (1984), or Hubbell (2000) surely could not have anticipated that such devices would become so common or imagined the breadth and depth of information they could contain. Notably, in each of those cases, a subpoena confined the information implicated by the compelled production. See Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 45–46; Doe I, 465 U.S. at 606–07, 607 nn.1–2; Fisher, 425 U.S. at 394–95, 394 nn.2–3. Fisher acknowledged this limited scope, stating that the subpoenas there sought “documents of unquestionable relevance to the tax investigation,” but that “[s]pecial problems of privacy . . . might be presented by subpoena of a personal diary.” 425 U.S. at 401 n.7; see also Barrett v. 4 Pew Research Ctr., Mobile Fact Sheet (June 12, 2019), https://www.pewresearch.org/internet /fact-sheet/mobile/ [https://perma.cc/8ZUY-EJDG]. Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 11 of 18 Acevedo, 169 F.3d 1155, 1167–68 (8th Cir. 1999) (en banc) (discussing the circuit split as to whether personal diaries can be subpoenaed); Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Documents and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, 48 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 27, 81 (1986) (opining that “certain types of highly private documents probably should not be obtainable by subpoena, regardless of whether they are self-incriminating”). And the Doe I Court remarked that the compelled documents, which “pertained to respondent’s businesses,” were less personal than those sought in Fisher, which “related to the taxpayers’ individual tax returns.” Doe I, 465 U.S. at 610 n.7. An unlocked smartphone, however, contains far more private information than a personal diary or an individual tax return ever could. Yet, when suspects are compelled to surrender their unlocked smartphones, there is no limiter like a documentary subpoena for specific files. See, e.g., United States v. Bishop, 910 F.3d 335, 336 (7th Cir. 2018), cert. denied, 139 S. Ct. 1590 (2019). Hubbell further illustrates the considerable difference between complying with a court order to produce an unlocked smartphone and complying with a documentary summons. Recall that, in Hubbell, the Government had not shown that it had any prior knowledge of either the existence or location of 13,120 pages of documents. 530 U.S. at 45. Though not an insignificant amount of information, it pales in comparison to what can be stored on today’s smartphones. Indeed, the cheapest model of last year’s top-selling smartphone, with a capacity of 64 gigabytes of data, can hold over 4,000,000 pages of documents—more than 300 times the number of pages produced in Hubbell. 5 It is no exaggeration to describe a smartphone’s passcode as “the proverbial ‘key to a man’s kingdom.’” United States v. Djibo, 151 F. Supp. 3d 297, 310 (E.D.N.Y. 2015). 5See Steve McCaskill, iPhone XR Was Best-Selling Smartphone of 2019, TechRadar (Feb. 26, 2020), https://www.techradar.com/news/iphone-xr-was-best-selling-smartphone-of-2019 [https://perma.cc/6PAC-WZT9]; Apple iPhone XR Tech Specs, https://www.apple.com/iphone -xr/specs/ [https://perma.cc/X9MU-Q9W4]; How Many Pages in a Gigabyte?, Lexis Nexis Discovery Series Fact Sheet, https://www.lexisnexis.com/applieddiscovery/lawlibrary /whitePapers/ADI_ FS_PagesInAGigabyte.pdf [https://perma.cc/JJP7-JQK5]. Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 12 of 18 This brings us to a second concern with extending the foregone conclusion exception—it may prove unworkable in this context. B. Extending the foregone conclusion exception to the compelled production of a smartphone may prove unworkable. Today’s smartphones “could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.” Riley, 573 U.S. at 393. And they can contain, in digital form, the “combined footprint of what has been occurring socially, economically, personally, psychologically, spiritually and sometimes even sexually, in the owner’s life.” Djibo, 151 F. Supp. 3d at 310. Recognizing these realities, several courts have determined that the government—prior to compelling a suspect to unlock their smartphone— must specifically identify the files it seeks with reasonable particularity. 6 But even then, the government should have access to only those files. Yet, compelling the production of an unlocked smartphone gives the government access to everything on the device, not just those files it can identify with “reasonable particularity.” For example, here, even if the State could show that it knew of and could identify specific files on Seo’s iPhone, there is nothing to restrict law enforcement’s access to only that 6See In re Application for a Search Warrant, 236 F. Supp. 3d at 1068, 1072–74; Trant, 2015 WL 7575496, at –3; Huang, 2015 WL 5611644, at –4; Pollard, 287 So. 3d at 657; G.A.Q.L., 257 So. 3d at 1063–65; Spicer, 125 N.E.3d at 1290–92; In re Grand Jury Investigation, 88 N.E.3d at 1181– 82. And several courts evaluating this issue in the context of other electronic devices, such as computers or hard drives, have similarly required the government to identify the information sought with reasonable particularity. See In re Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum Dated Mar. 25, 2011, 670 F.3d 1335, 1345–47 (11th Cir. 2012); In re Decryption of a Seized Data Storage Sys., No. 13-M-449, 2013 WL 12327372, at  (E.D. Wis. Apr. 19, 2013); United States v. Hatfield, No. 06CR-0550 (JS), 2010 WL 1423103, at –2 (E.D.N.Y. Apr. 7, 2010); In re Boucher, No. 2:06-mj-91, 2009 WL 424718, at –4 (D. Vt. Feb. 19, 2009); cf. United States v. Apple MacPro Comput., 851 F.3d 238, 247–48 (3d Cir. 2017); In re Search of a Residence, No. 17-mj-70656-JSC-1, 2018 WL 1400401, at –12 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 20, 2018). Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 13 of 18 information. After all, the warrant authorized a search of Seo’s device without limitation. Such unbridled access to potential evidence on her iPhone—or any smartphone—raises several complex questions. For example, if officers searching a suspect’s smartphone encounter an application or website protected by another password, will they need a separate motion to compel the suspect to unlock that application or website? And would the foregone conclusion exception apply to that act of production as well? Suppose law enforcement opens an application or website and the password populates automatically. Can officers legally access that information? Or what if a suspect has a cloud-storage service—like iCloud or Dropbox—installed on the device, which could contain hundreds of thousands of files. Can law enforcement look at those documents, even though this windfall would be equivalent to identifying the location of a locked storage facility that officers did not already know existed? Such complexity is neither necessary nor surprising: the foregone conclusion exception is, in this context, a low-tech peg in a cutting-edge hole. This leads to a third concern with extending the foregone conclusion exception—it seems imprudent in light of recent Supreme Court precedent concerning smartphones and the limited, questionable application of the exception. C. U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the foregone conclusion exception’s limited application counsel against extending it further. The Supreme Court has hesitated to apply even entrenched doctrines to novel dilemmas, wholly unforeseen when those doctrines were created. Indeed, the Court recently observed that, when “confronting new concerns wrought by digital technology,” it “has been careful not to uncritically extend existing precedents.” Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206, 2222 (2018). To that point, four years earlier, in Riley, the Court held that the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement does not extend to a cell phone found on an arrestee. 573 U.S. at 401–02. And in Carpenter, the Court held that the third-party doctrine Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 14 of 18 does not extend to cellular site location information, at least when seven days’ worth of data is obtained. 138 S. Ct. at 2217 & n.3. The Supreme Court’s refusal to extend these two established doctrines—each far more deeply rooted than the foregone conclusion exception—is instructive. Though Riley and Carpenter were decided under the Fourth Amendment, the Court’s concern in each case was with the “privacy interests” implicated by smartphones. Riley, 573 U.S. at 397; Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2214–15. And that privacy concern likewise applies to the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination. Even though this privilege is not “a general protector of privacy,” Fisher recognized that it “truly serves privacy interests” by protecting suspects from being compelled to provide private, self-incriminating testimony. 425 U.S. at 399, 401; see also id. at 416–17 (Brennan, J., concurring in the judgment) (“Expressions are legion in opinions of this Court that the protection of personal privacy is a central purpose of the privilege against compelled self-incrimination.”); Murphy v. Waterfront Comm’n of N.Y. Harbor, 378 U.S. 52, 55 (1964); In re Grand Jury Proceedings, 632 F.2d 1033, 1042–44 (3d Cir. 1980). The limited, and questionable, application of the foregone conclusion exception also cautions against extending it further. Indeed, Fisher was decided over forty-four years ago, and it remains the lone U.S. Supreme Court decision to find that the exception applied. In the intervening years, the Court has discussed it twice and in only one context: in grand jury proceedings when a subpoena compelled the production of business and financial records. During this same time period, legal scholars—including three current members of the Supreme Court—have wondered whether Fisher interpreted the Fifth Amendment too narrowly, calling into question the viability of the foregone conclusion exception itself. See Hubbell, 530 U.S. at 49–56 (Thomas, J., concurring); Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2271 (Gorsuch, J., dissenting); Alito, Jr., supra, at 45–51; see also, e.g., Bryan H. Choi, The Privilege Against Cellphone Incrimination, 97 Tex. L. Rev. Online 73, 74 n.6 (2019); Richard A. Nagareda, Compulsion “To Be a Witness” and the Resurrection of Boyd, 74 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1575, 1606 & nn.124–25 (1999); Robert Heidt, The Fifth Amendment Privilege and Documents—Cutting Fisher’s Tangled Line, 49 Mo. L. Rev. 439, 443 (1984). Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 15 of 18 Regardless of the foregone conclusion exception’s viability, it seems imprudent to extend it beyond its one-time application. Cf. Silverman v. United States, 365 U.S. 505, 510, 512 (1961) (deciding not to extend the rationale of a factually distinct case “by even a fraction of an inch”). It is not surprising that courts to recently address this issue—how the Fifth Amendment applies to the compelled production of unlocked electronic devices—have either declined to extend the foregone conclusion exception or have not mentioned it at all. 7 Not only was the exception crafted for a vastly different context, but extending it further would mean expanding a decades-old and narrowly defined legal exception to dynamically developing technology that was in its infancy just a decade ago. And it would also result in narrowing a constitutional right. Yet, while we have identified three concerns with extending the foregone conclusion exception to this context, we do not need to make a general pronouncement on its validity because it simply does not apply here. At the same time, we emphasize that there are several ways law enforcement can procure evidence from smartphones without infringing on an individual’s Fifth Amendment rights. For example, officers could try to obtain information from third parties under the Stored Communications Act. See 18 U.S.C. 121 §§ 2701–2713 (2018). Alternatively, two companies—Cellebrite and Grayshift—offer law enforcement agencies affordable products that provide access to a locked smartphone. See generally, e.g., United States v. Chavez-Lopez, 767 F. App’x 431, 433–34 (4th Cir. 2019). Or officers could seek an order compelling the smartphone’s manufacturer to help bypass the lock screen. See In re XXX, Inc., No. 14 Mag. 2258, 2014 WL 5510865 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 31, 2014). And if law enforcement wants to get into a smartphone for reasons other than prosecution, they can offer immunity to the device’s owner. See Doe I, 465 U.S. at 614–15. But the State cannot fish for incriminating evidence by forcing Seo to give unfettered access to her iPhone when it has failed to 7See United States v. Jimenez, 419 F. Supp. 3d 232, 233 (D. Mass. 2020); Wright, 431 F. Supp. 3d at 1186–88; In re Residence in Oakland, 354 F. Supp. 3d at 1016–18; Davis, 220 A.3d at 550. Indiana Supreme Court | Case No. 18S-CR-595 | June 23, 2020 Page 16 of 18 show that any files on Seo’s smartphone exist or that she possessed those files. Nearly a century ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, “Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.” Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 474 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting). That day has come. And to allow the State, on these facts, to force Seo to unlock her iPhone for law enforcement would tip the scales too far in the State’s favor, resulting in a seismic erosion of the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination. This we will not do.