Police asked this 3D printing lab to recreate a dead man's fingers to unlock his phone
Last month, law enforcement officers showed up at the lab of Anil Jain, a professor at Michigan State University. Jain wasn't in trouble; the officers wanted his help.
Context & Ripple Effects
Anil Jain's lab at Michigan State had already shown fingerprint sensors are soft targets: months earlier, his team unlocked a Samsung Galaxy S6 and a Huawei Honor 7 using inkjet prints. The police visit takes that research out of the lab and into active casework — officers supplying a corpse's fingers as the template instead of a photo or scan.
The request matters because it predates a documented pipeline: weeks later, researchers rebuilt fingerprints from 2D photographs to open a Galaxy S6 for police, and by 2018 Forbes was reporting that US law enforcement routinely unlocks iPhones with dead victims' fingerprints without a search warrant. Jain's 3D-printed replicas sit at the start of that arc.
First-order effects
- Jain's lab is now an operational resource for investigators, converting academic spoofing research into a service police can request when a decedent's phone is locked.
Second-order effects
- Once one department demonstrates the technique, other agencies can replicate it with cheaper inputs — the follow-on work showing 2D photos suffice means labs no longer need physical remains, only images of them.
Third-order effects
- Biometrics of the dead occupy a legal gray zone: unlike passwords, fingerprints appear to require no warrant after death, and the same gap already shows up in police seeking suspects' DNA from Ancestry and 23andMe databases and mining car sensor data under looser privacy standards — a body of practice forming faster than case law constraining it.
The trend: Law enforcement is systematically routing around device encryption by treating bodies, genes, and vehicles as warrant-free data sources.