Trick is not to use your right index finger as a biometric unlock finger (the button sits on the top right corner of the keyboard). If you are "forced" to unlock, the agents will guide your fingers and probably try that first 2-3 times. 2 more tries, and fingerprint reading gets disabled. Quite good odds.
It's hold power+volume up (the "top two buttons" when reaching down into a pocket or purse and the phone) until the phone vibrates (~2s).
If you can see the screen, it's the fastest shortcut gesture to the screen that has "Slide to Power Off", "Medical ID", and "Emergency Call". Any other way to get to that screen also works to require a PIN before next unlock.
One is knowledge the user has, and the other is a physical key they own.
Providing your 'finger' to unlock a device is no different than providing your 'key' to unlock something. So you can be compelled to provide those biometrics.
Compelling you to reveal a password is not some *thing* you have but knowledge you contain. Being compelled to provide that knowledge is no different than being compelled to reveal where you were or what you were doing at some place or time.
That is genuinely the current state of law, yes. There's no real logic at work, just attempts at clawing back control whenever a new gray area appears.
My fiancé is an attorney and I'm an engineer, and she looked at me incredulously when point out anything that is not logical in her legal work. I'm thankful my father talked me out of becoming a lawyer.
Put them in jail until they do or charge them with whatever the local flavor for "obstruction" is. In places where they're allowed by law to require you to give up a password not doing so when the proper steps are taken would usually be it's own crime, usually phrased as some sort of "obstruction" charge with it's own sentence. And that's just places where the law and citizen rights are a meaningful concept in restraining state power.
Depending on the country and the willingness to comply with legal norms somewhere between putting you in prison until you give it up and hitting you with a stick until you give it up.
And to be clear, in other words, that means you can’t be compelled. You can effectively resist giving up your password, you cannot effectively resist giving up your finger, gruesome though the prospect might be.
You can still be legally compelled to provide testimony, the catch is merely that you have to be granted immunity from being charged with a crime on the basis of any derived evidence. In this case, it seems that the WaPo journalist could still be compelled to provide such information if she's not charged for any crime.
Yes the difference come from a close parsing of the 5th amendment, telling cops the password or code for a device or safe is pretty clearly compelling speech and adverse testimony while allowing cops to gather fingerprints and DNA has long been held as allowed so biometrics were analogized to that. It's also similar to the rule that cops can't force you to tell them the code to a safe but they're allowed with a warrant to destructively open the safe (if it falls under the terms of the warrant). Combine those too legal threads and it's at least reasonable to see how that line gets drawn from previous rulings.
