Hacker News Reader

Comment by khc | Hacker News Reader

The best smartphone security doesn't help when you are forced to unlock your phone.

Until the "best smartphone security" is two passwords: The second you enter when under duress, and it populates your phone with pro government content based on your current location. Or just wipes your phone. Or permanently locks, encrypts, and sends decryption key to some trusted source.

And then we beat you up for deliberately sabotaging our investigation. If you didn't have anything to hide why would you wipe your phone? Clearly you must be a spy or worse so we have no choice but to send you to the re-education camp.

The action should be indistinguishable from a remote-wipe if possible.

So it was working right up until you put in the special password? How would you make it look like a remote wipe?

Also, keep in mind, remote wiping your phone after the police take it is evidence tampering. In the US, that alone can get you imprisoned.

Well yes, it's not trivial. The lock screen would have to remain unaffected and the filesystem would have to look like it was rebuilt a few hours ago.

The Xiaomi phones have this. You can create a "Second Space" with a different PIN (or using a different fingerprint to unlock it) from the first. When you use the second PIN it unlocks a completely separate environment which is not aware of the other one.

At which point your captors just beat or murder you because they know that feature exists.

Sure, unless they actually want the information. So you'd' have to choose which outcome would be better for you and / or your cause. But that's the point, at least you'd still get to choose. For the sake of argument, imagine the dual password is a bit more intelligent about what it displays and hides based on what you've entered.

I was wondering for a while why such a feature doesnt yet exist.

In the US, such a feature could be used for evidence tampering. Very illegal.

I wonder why the embassy did not remotely wipe his phone, since this was his work phone.

With that said, I don't understand how he could not have expected that when visiting China.

> With that said, I don't understand how he could not have expected that when visiting China.

He was employed by the British consulate in Hong Kong. Generally it's not a good idea for countries to torture people working for foreign consulates given that it's sure to spark huge diplomatic crises. The level of physical abuse forced on him is despicable, hopefully the EU will have the guts to impose strict economic sanctions on China to deter the Chinese government from taking insane actions like this again.

He was employed by a foreign consulate but, in the mind of the Chinese government, he is a Chinese and therefore belongs to China.

They didn't really need his phone though. They were never actually trying to get information from him, just forcing him to say certain things.

From his FB post, they got him to give information on the org structure of the protest groups he was in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com