The headline is wrong.
Fascist regime fucks over people's constitutional rights and could send a man to prison for protecting his own privacy.
There, fixed.
This is fucking stupid. If I delete something on my phone while I'm on vacation am I going to prison because the border patrol might have wanted to look at it?
Should have been born a child fucking billionaire if you don’t want to be sentenced to prison for 30 years.
What color are you and how far left are your politics?
It’s bullshit but with the current laws. Back up your phone before you head home wipe it before going through border control, and restore your backup when you get home.
The indictment alleges that Tunick knowingly deleted the phone’s digital contents
My hot take: the officer wiped the phone. With their own hands. They're just stupid.
Hotter take: The phone was empty when he handed it over. There was nothing to delete.
If they succeed I guess in the future an officer could delete your phone to save face then blame it on you.
Yeah, they are masters of parallel construction. ( Aka lying)
Without a warrant, it's literally his phone to do with it what he pleases. Baffled that that's not the end of the conversation.
Assuming we lived in a rational world with a fair and impartial justice system, and not one that exists to funnel money from the working class into the Epstein class and kill or imprison everyone that makes that less easy.
Oh, because they are outside US borders they claim not to need a warrant, but that doesn't stop them using US law to prosecute him though.
What a shithole
GrapheneOS should update the duress passcode to load a dummy profile like Only Key’s Plausible Deniability Feature.
Idr if this was a feature that made it into a real OS or just a concept that never came to be, but...
I recall reading about a duress pin that instead of deleting stuff, just booted up normally... but to basically a separate user profile. From the non-duress profile you could choose features that would be shared between the two, like texts or call history of specific people, browser history, photo albums, etc.
So "sure officer, it's 5224" would open up a phone profile that looks convincingly used, with nice long trails of cat memes and chatter with your gaming buddies about your favorite franchise enshittifying, and so on.
Punch in your real pin to unlock it though, and it's got full access to everything, including data you want to keep private.
...and, uh, if any of you are designing a mobile OS right now, here's your feature suggestion!
Guys don't travel to fascist countries.
To be fair, a duress pin is definitely a good thing to have if you're being mugged, but using it to deliberately destroy data when it's been seized by a lawful authority is guaranteed to land you in serious trouble pretty much anywhere. Whether the border agents were, in fact, a lawful authority, and whether they had a lawful reason to seize his phone are very different questions.
The much more sensible approach is to either have a separate phobe for travelling, that has nothing you care about on it, or wipe your phone before you travel, and spend a little time building up an innocuous history on it, without putting anything you care about on it. Anything you absolutely must have access to while you're away can be stored, encrypted, online, and you can remember the details to retrieve it.
I'm not sure any law force agency in the US is lawful anymore.
Third option: Refuse to give your phone credentials unless these fascist pigs have a warrant or provide you with a lawyer.
The fifth amendment applies to this because he was a US citizen. He had every right to not give them his pin and it would only be destroying evidence if charges had been pressed. In this case some butt hurt border guard just really wanted to look at his vacation pictures or some shit.
Maybe instead of wiping the phone and restarting the duress pin should show a pre-selected number of apps and wipe everything else.
The much more sensible approach is ...
The fact that we're discussing ways to sneak past the fascist border guards, by getting very lawyerly with a bunch of fiddly rules they don't actually give a hoot about, is kind of a big hint that we've already lost our liberties to a degree we are reluctant to acknowledge.
This guy was singled out for his political opinions. Border patrol held him as a political prisoner, and when we read the story about him, we all see only too clearly that this could be any one of us.
As far as anyone knows, the CP thing was an excuse, a lie. The authoritarians aren't following the rules, the rules exist to serve as excuses to hurt us. There isn't going to be some magic combination of smartphone hygiene and "I know my rights" phrases that will let us escape targeting by the most corrupt cops in the country.
The much more sensible approach is to either have a separate phobe for travelling, that has nothing you care about on it
and people have gotten in trouble for that, too, for having a travel phone, a phone that was too clean, etc etc.
Because its not about the phone. Its about stealing data. pictures for facial recognition, contacts so they can map groups, communications so they can search for whatever bullshit excuse they want to string people up.
This isnt about law. its not about protection people/the country.
Its about being fascist dicks to undesirable groups of people. Aint seen one motherfucker on the epstein list, one motherfucking CEO, or any trump cockface have their phone seized by border patrol to steal any data.
If the duress pin makes obvious it's the duress pin then it's not really doing its job. It should instead open a profile with not much in it while erasing the other profile and files in the background.
What law did he break? Vs the warrantless search that is breaking the law. If only the supreme court didn't give them a pass.
I'm half-expecting for it to turn out that he was being wholly compliant, and he's being accused of destruction of evidence because they were looking for something that never existed to begin with.
Prosecuted for what, exactly? If push comes to shove, it's a fifth amendment issue.
I would wager that this is going to become a test case that is intended to appeal it's way to the SCotUS. The SCotUS has already ruled that many constitutional protections are waived at the border, so it wouldn't be surprising if that is the intended outcome.
Land of the Free™
My understanding is you can't actually be forced (legally) to give up your phone's PIN or password as part of a police search, because it violates the 5th amendment against self-incrimination, even at the border. Now will they still find a way to fuck up your day if you refuse to unlock your phone, sure, but I feel like saying "I have a right under the 5th Amendment to not reveal my password" is going to be a lot easier to defend than "I intentionally wiped/locked/bricked my phone when you asked to look through it."
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