Without a warrant, CBP wasn't entitled to anything on his phone and they can go fuck themselves.
It's cute that you think there are still laws in the US.
They have to charge him with something.
Do they though? Someone should tell all the people in literal concentration camps after receiving no due process
I have a friend in Florida. They have a guy that runs a business and does all their house repairs, fells trees, yada yada. His inlaws turned him in for being illegal (he's not) He had his paperwork with him and they still shipped him off to Alligator Alcatraz. His wife hired a lawyer and had to do all kinds of crap to get him back out... on bail... because his mother-in-law called him an illegal.
The mother in law needs to be fed to a fucking gator
Just drive her out to the everglades and leave her there with no food or water, she won't make it back.
Says who? How many people are being held in your country without any due process at all?
That increasingly means nothing. Remember that judge who was sending kids to reform camps for kickbacks? Part of that scheme was they literally made up charges. If the system says it's a charge and you need to be punished then that's what's going to happen. Juries aren't even a thing until you get to major felonies anymore so it's just whatever the judge lets the prosecutor get away with.
Resisting arrest. Evidence tampering. Obstruction of justice. Take your pick.
If anyone is interested in having a feature to wipe your phone, GRAPHENEOS has a duress pin option that will wipe your phone from the lock screen and leave only the OS installed. AFAIK this us only available on Google Pixel devices like the gentleman in the article had.
As someone who accidentally entered the duress pin, I can confirm. It's highly effective.
"Hey, babe. Let me look at your text messages."
"Uh, sure, let me just 'unlock' it."
"Wait, why did you say that with quotes?'
"Oh, bad news, hun, seems my phone wiped itself."
It'd be fascinating to see how this plays out in the courts.
Technically it'd be the officers themselves performing the wipes, right? Could you say you got the pins mixed up in your head and get away with it?
I think the prosecutor is going to drop the charges because I don't think he broke a law. So we'll not find out..
But also, the defendant doesn't have to prove anything and would probably be wise not to testify in court. If you decide that you're going to testify at all, then they can ask you a lot of other questions that you probably don't want to answer. So almost all of the time you should shut the fuck up. :-)
Well, the "free" state of Fl*rida just made it a misdemeanor to cover your license plate with materials that prevent those fucking Flock cameras from scanning it and putting you in a database so they can use the 'ole American warrantless data purchase loophole (a time-worn classic) to sell your location data to law enforcement and other third parties and upgrades the offense to a felony if used to commit another crime which in Florida could be just about anything. They (or any red state shithole) could literally make sneezing a misdemeanor and get away with it at this point while the MAGAts cheer because only the "bad people" sneeze, not them, never. So all the red state legislatures will probably collaborate to whip up some new bullshit laws at suspiciously the same time stating that if a person attempts to wipe their phone while being detained or gives a false self destruct duress pin to an officer it's now a class a/type 1/highest tier whatever felony with up to a bajillion years in prison. Then if the courts block it they'll appeal to a different, Trump appointed judge who will rule that a person "has no reasonable expectation of privacy during detainment by a public defender because they are now legally by definition in public" or some shit all in the name of freedumb of course.
So maybe you can do something that relies on them fucking it up. Set the lock to, for example, 43o1. Set the duress pin to 4301.
If asked for the pin, say "four three oh one". Chances are good they'll interpret the "oh" as a 0. They can play back any recordings they have as evidence, and you'll clearly be on record saying something that was not the pin they typed in. You did not mislead them.
This is actually some ridiculously smart advice. Do they have alphas in unlock code?
Fl*rida just made it a misdemeanor to cover your license plate with materials that prevent those fucking Flock cameras from scanning it
That's not even remotely new. It's been illegal to cover a licence plate with anything that obstructs it being read, manually or otherwise, for as long as we've had licence plates.
They may have tweaked the language a little here and there; but that law has always been around in some form.
Well one could possibly coat the license plate with a material that left those cameras unable to scan the plate, while any human could read it just fine, not even knowing there was something different about it. I would be totally in favor of that.
The law bans that too.
The original law? What's the wording on that I wonder...
This arrest is the best damn advertisement ever
My work phone has enabled "wipe if pin is wrong three times".
I discovered after my son wiped it three times. I must though it was defective and asked for replacement
Yeah, I think it needs to be "wipe if a specific pin is entered", so you can wipe it only when you intend to.
Side note, my son has called the cops on several occasions by hitting the emergency button on the lock screen. Kids just have to play with it...
Side note, my son has called the cops on several occasions by hitting the emergency button on the lock screen. Kids just have to play with it...
I've almost done this on several occasions by locking my phone and putting it in my pocket while the screen was still on. Happened way too easily.
My phone has that thing where it tries to detect a car crash and dials 911 and messages your emergency contact.
Dropped my phone down some stairs didn't realize it went off till the cops and fire department showed up...
That was awful.
We don't know the exact circumstances, but CBP stands for Customs and Border Protection.
I've heard of Customs agents demanding people let them search phones without a warrant and without probable cause, and so foreigners can be refused entry. We probably all heard the story of it happening for a person who had a meme of JD Vance on his phone.
But the article says that this guy is based out of Atlanta, so I'm guessing he's a US citizen. I'm not sure they can refuse entry to a US citizen based on this.
Either way, you should never give permission to anybody to search your phone. Maybe you've broken a law that you didn't know was a law, and you've just handed the evidence over to the police. Or maybe you have evidence that can convict somebody else who didn't know they broke a law.
I don't know what this means for people crossing the US border. Now is a bad time to enter the United States.
CBP has higher power than regular police, sadly.
https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/know-your-rights/know-your-rights-us-airports-and-ports-entry
Turns out, no matter who is in charge, we were living under an oppressive regime.
Legally, they cannot refuse entry to a US Citizen. Legally.
But just because someone is based in the US doesn't mean they're a citizen. And they don't need any justification to search someone, because airports and land within 100 miles of a border is a "constitution-free zone" (but not 100 miles from an airport, contrary to popular belief).
Lmao so now we're saying all of Southern California south of Newport Beach (85 mi from Tijuana) is a place where the constitution does not apply? New York west of Rochester? (80 mi from Niagara) Pretty much all of Alaska's tail thingy next to Canada? 😂
Oh it's worse than that. International airports also count towards that. So if you live within 100 miles from an airport with international flights you are deprived of a lot of rights.
Yup. And guess what, those ares are also where nearly two thirds of the country lives.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/your-rights-border-zone
Yes. You are beginning to understand what has been going on.
Not us, SCOTUS said it.
They have to "develop probable cause" to do more than check your ID but we've seen how easy that is over the years. At the end of the day they will make up the probable cause if they need to. But even more importantly this is the authority they're using to have Border Patrol conduct military style patrols in our cities.
Or they can illegally use it to attack a law abiding person that had photos they dislike. Maybe that's the day they go rogue, maybe they were already crooked.
you should never give permission to anybody to search your phone
Not only does your phone have access to all your social media accounts, email, text, phone logs, but it's also commonly used as a security device (multi factor authentication) to sign in to other accounts like your bank account, work login, etc. If you allow someone into your phone they can possibly access your work resources and that could be an even bigger problem.
Do not let anyone have access to your phone.
Details are weird here. The wiping occurred in Jan 2025. I found the indictment which was filed with the court on Nov 13th 2025 linked here
We have almost no details of what happened in Jan 2025 except "Customs and Border Patrol Tactical Terrorism Response Team" was doing something with Tunick in January and Tunick "used a code" to wipe the phone. Then suddenly in November 2025 the US Government filed to have him arrested for that event.
I'm not a legal scholar, but none of these details or timeline makes sense to me. Anyone else have any clue?
It's not complicated, it's Border Patrol doing their MAGA duty. The only thing we know about this case is what MAGA tells us, so it's almost all certainly a lie. Of course the details and timeline don't make sense, they are probably entirely fabricated.
I'll take a "deleted data" charge. On principle.
Absolutely. Got mad "I do lots of illegal shit, but I draw the line at littering" vibes.
Sometimes, doing the illegal thing is to do the moral thing.
Always turn your phone offer before deplaning and don’t turn it back on until you’ve cleared customs. You can refuse a search and even if they take your phone they still don’t have a method of decrypting a phone that’s encrypted at rest after being turned off and all biometrics are disabled on start up until a password is entered (most phones).
You’ll most likely lose your phone and a few hours but that’s what you have backups for.
Reminder that Apple/Google will absolutely give law enforcement all your cloud data if presented with a warrant. I know this for a fact. Most people's phone data is synced to the cloud. Be careful out there folks.
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