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 Michigan State lab was not an arbitrary choice for the police visit: months earlier, his team had shown that inkjet-printed fingerprints could unlock Samsung Galaxy S6 and Huawei Honor 7 handsets, so the lab had already proven the spoofing technique officers now wanted applied to a deceased victim's phone.
The request matters because it moves fingerprint forgery from research demo to forensic service. Follow-on coverage shows the technique scaling fast — weeks later researchers unlocked a Galaxy S6 from 2D photos alone, and by 2018 sources told Forbes that US law enforcement was routinely using dead victims' fingerprints on iPhones without a search warrant.
First-order effects
- Police gain a practical workaround to biometric locks on a dead suspect's or victim's phone, with Jain's lab effectively serving as an ad hoc forensic vendor.
Second-order effects
- Device makers face a spoofing arms race: if printed fingers and photo reconstructions defeat sensors, fingerprint readers need liveness detection, pushing authentication toward harder-to-forge biometrics.
- Other labs and cheaper techniques — like reconstructing prints from photos rather than physical molds — lower the cost of the same capability, spreading it beyond one university lab.
Third-order effects
- A legal asymmetry hardens: because a dead person cannot consent or contest, fingerprints taken without a warrant sit outside normal Fourth Amendment friction, joining warrantless pulls of consumer DNA data from Ancestry and 23andMe as routine investigative practice.
- If the pattern holds, courts and legislatures face pressure to define post-mortem digital rights — deciding whether a decedent's biometrics and device contents are evidence by default or protected property.
The trend: Law enforcement is assembling a toolkit of warrantless access routes to personal data — corpses' fingerprints, consumer DNA databases, connected-car records — faster than privacy law defines the limits.