Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
-------- Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
The failure that allowed trump to happen stems from one thing. Lack of imagination. The system in the US assumes that all of the politicians are at least attempting to argue in good faith. trump is more like a hurricane. he rolled in, fucked everthing up, and will roll out.
After November when the Democrat party has control of the upper and lower houses of congress, there are going to be investigations, grand jury indictments, and people will go to prison. They will also begin the work of closing some of the loopholes that were used to bypass how the government is supposed to operate.
He didn't have "Putin next election year" merch for it, so I guess you can say this is innovation.
Citizens United was a decision by an unelected group of federal judges we call the Supreme Court when a case was brought before them to determine if chump could have Navy Seal Team 6 assinate a political opponent. They ruled, that yeah, he can. Supreme court justices are appointed for life and have no oversight or ethical restrictions.
They are bound by duty to be impartial. They are not.
The Supreme court is not supposed to MAKE law, that's the job of Congress, they are supposed to interpret the law. The Citizens United supreme court decision made new law, but it was made by people that were not elected by the citizens of this country. They are not acting in good faith, and are clearly in it to help chump.
In some cases it works much better than "criminal's have rights, victims doesn't" Continental law system in Europe.
In other cases, it's insanity.
In normal World, criminals have rights for any kind of defense. And that's good, because government have power to make anyone "criminal".
Total breach of privacy by US government is a mirror to shitload of problems US has.
Europe js heading same direction (both the problems & government solutions).
> In some cases it works much better than "criminal's have rights, victims doesn't" Continental law system in Europe.
What on earth are you talking about, "victims" definitively have rights in most European countries, but the fact you seemingly think there is one "Continental law system in Europe" clearly shows you have zero idea what you're talking about, Europe isn't one country with one law system across the continent...
Sometimes, it's better just to say nothing :)
The Napoleonic Code is indeed pervasive across the continent. And, ignoring that, we have EU law, which is supra-statal law that most certainly and de facto has come to replace/impose on "local" laws.
in a nutshell, EU law takes precedence over conflicting national laws in areas where the EU has competence.
While EU law is directly applicable or requires transposition into national law, member states retain autonomy in areas outside EU competence.
National courts are obligated to interpret domestic law in line with EU law.
National Constitutional Court/Supreme court, occasionally challenge EU law’s supremacy.
> Sometimes, it's better just to say nothing :)
Right.
You should make this as your life credo. Change "sometimes" into "always" till you learn something.
It's called Continental law system, because main principles are same. And above that, there's EU legislation which is mandatory to all member states and is always to be adopted in national laws.
And your bullshit about law working for the rich in US is really stupid. Extremly rich are almost untouchable everywhere in the World. Rich have a fighting chance of getting better outcome. And poor people have chance tk seek justice against roughly equal opponent. This is not about US, this is about how World works.
Somewhat of a paradox no? I'm guessing your belief here is that I learned something by what you just told me, so me not saying until now when I read your comment, is exactly what you wanted?
> It's called Continental law system, because main principles are same. And above that, there's EU legislation which is mandatory to all member states and is always to be adopted in national laws.
If you're under the belief that all countries in Europe have the same laws across borders because many countries have a civil law system, I'm not sure what to tell you, that's not how it works, and many countries have very different law systems, even if they come from the same origin. Neither would I say that countries "adopt EU legislation", but I guess that's a technicality. Usually you'd say that the countries implement their own laws based on the directives the European Commission comes up. But again, borderline nitpick, maybe better I don't mention this at all lest y'all get stuck on this particular point...
> This is not about US, this is about how World works.
Yeah, let me know when you understand how the entire world works friend ;) I won't claim to know that, although I do know home. But again, have fun, surely you'll get close! :)
Guess you'll never understand what is Continental law system. Or what is the meaning of word principle. Or what transposition is in terms of EU legislation.
Keep whining kiddo, that's the best proof that as always, your desperate attempt to portray yourself as someone knowledgeable, failed.
You can again give me one pathetic downvote ... that's your ultimate weapon. That will sure teach me a lesson for disrespecting big LLM gangsta with 96GB VRAM ... and all of sudden, crying for not being able to see tables in comments because all he has is mobile device.
Keep living your online fiction, slumdog millionaire.
My previous comments are related to the topic. Yours are just desperate attempt to portray yourself as someone knowledgeable, which you're not.
Keep living your online fiction, slumdog millionaire.
Wait, you want to eliminate innocent until proven guilty?
Straw man argument. Everybody has rights in the EU, including people suspected of being criminals, and of course victims.
Arguing that in the EU victims have no rights is insulting for anyone reading your comment. That far-right view of the world is false and it is just trying to misinform and create hate.
It is a mere declaration, as specified at the top of the page, that "is widely recognized as having inspired [...] the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties"
That does not make it an enforceable law. Moreover, treaties are agreements between countries, not laws, which a country can violate at will.
People might create supranational organizations like the UN or the ECHR, but that has, untimately, no enforcement power because that always belongs to sovereign countries. Violating a treaty can also lead to retaliation by other signatories or even war, but it still does not make a treaty law.
It might well be that the US has specific laws that prevent charging a citizen when they wipe their phone. But that must be a law passed by the US legislature, not a "universal declaration".
It is subject to judicial review, but has equal standing.
So the US cannot "violate [it] at will".
+ entire regions / areas where merely visiting those areas invites a highly non-trivial (think, more than 10% chance) chance of being kidnapped or murdered
+ every neighborhood and business has substantial, often military-grade private security
+ if credit exists at all, it exists outside of any formal banking structure and will have interest rates that are north of 30% APR, sometimes north of 100% APR. I've genuinely seen interest rates on credit as high as 2% *per day*, and these are rates that the local population is willing to pay for certain short term expenses (like food)
+ families that maintain good social relationships with the local police/militants/whoever-has-guns live substantially better lives than people without good social connections to the local authorities.
+ Travelers are told on repeat: "it's really not safe here for non-locals, you should stay inside and also reconsider being in this part of the world at all"
+ If the travelers are there for business reasons, they are probably assigned 24/7 armed guards (as many as 4 guards per traveler, each guard carrying full-auto weapons) by the locals, provided for free.
And while the US maybe has a neighborhood here or there which might be like this, every part of every major city in the country has more rule of law than the above.
Do you really think that judges that have to run for reelection every few years can be more trusted to rule on cases fairly, according to the law, rather than bending to popular whims?
The emphasis is on “more” trusted.
Supreme court justice positions should be limited to around thirteen (or some other prime number) years and should have mandatory cognitive capacity tests given yearly that are videotaped and broadcast live. The tests should be written by a nonpartisan panel of doctors chosen randomly from an applicant pool like a jury and refreshed every five years.
Rule of law is not about order nor safety
Statements like "the US does not have the rule of law" are laughable Reddit-tier comments that just make me sad for the current state of HN.
Separately, internal security forces have been killing citizens without any cause nor investigation after the fact, in contravention to all of the supposed "rights" those citizens were once said to have.
These are the things the rule of law is about. It is meant to be a higher power than any individual, no matter their position.
The U.S. does not have the rule of law any longer. It's best to look the truth in the face rather than hide from it.
Yes, a big part of the idea is that laws are meant to also apply to the powerful, but it's difficult to accurately assess situations that are far away from you.
But I agree with you that nuance-free oversimplifications are likely unhelpful in any meaningful discussion.
These things don’t usually happen overnight, and for the vast majority of the public it will never be directly visible. It’s not like someone flips a “Anti-Antifa” switch and a bunch of ultra-starched uniformed troops start goose-stepping through Toledo. It’s a developing series of dynamic events, many of them will seem rational, justified even, but the result is concentrated executive power, a toothless legislature, a complicit judiciary, and a pliant mainstream press. I’m sure there are lots of people who will recognize these for what they are: an alarming number of dominoes falling towards a totalitarian dictatorship.
However the United States is a big, complex beast of a country, and the judiciary has not been fully captured, and neither has the legislature. All we need to do to stop this creeping authoritarianism is show up in-force and vote overwhelmingly against it this November. They will obviously try to confuse the issue with any close calls, and use such opportunities to assert dominion over local/state governments. We cannot let that happen. The best way to avoid such a scenario is to show up strong enough to make the results beyond question. That’s the ultimate test that we are still a nation of laws, and I am cautiously optimistic.
If you aren’t glued to the news and doomscrolling you wouldn’t know anything about Trump and ICE. Day to day for nearly everyone is exactly the same rule of law where you can call police for a murder and roving gangs can’t setup shakedown checkpoints.
Is that your threshold for "rule of law"? And I'm sorry, but what separates ICE from a roving gang setting up shakedown checkpoints, and executing at point blank range with no repercussions dissenters?
This is such an outrageously privileged and out-of-touch statement. Maybe YOU wouldn't know about Trump and ICE if you didn't read the news, but that's your personal microcosm. Please be more mindful about damage and harm done when you're ascribing your personal worldview onto others' actual reality.
How do you reconcile that proposition with the observable reality of the courts routinely blocking the current administration's excesses?
Interesting. Again, how do you reconcile that theory with the with the large number of court cases involving Trump's specific actions that managed to make it all the way up to the Supreme Court, leading to many clear rulings against Trump, all within the first year and a half of his current term?
Like demolish a whole wing of the White House without any review or control. Starting a wa... sorry. Special Military Operation unilaterally etc.
All illegal but whatchagonnado when they already did it?
Dictators expect that people fear them, they control by fear and terror. If you can make jokes about leaders you show that you don't fear them, you show that they don't control you.
But the increase in corruption in US goverment indicates slow progress towards authoritarianism. This can be slow process, it can take years or decades, as was seen with Hitler and Stalin.
ICE excessive force use, encouraged by Trump and welcomed in large part of US population, could be the next step. This piece by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller describes the progression of authoritarianism:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for meThere's still reasonable civil debate here. But recently I was surprised to be called a fascist for pointing out the Nazis were national socialists. The poster included comments like "don't engage with this person he's obviously x y and z." I'm starting to see this kind of nonsense more and more on hacker news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Amazing!
I also can't think of any US cities where neighborhoods have military grade armed security. Sure, there are places where every local business has an armed guard, but that's not really the same as hiring a trained private militia. The armed guards are for protecting against petty theft, not for protecting against organized crime.
On point four, I'm not sure if there are places in the US where minorities need to maintain relationships social relationships with cops as a survival mechanic, but it certainly doesn't apply to most cities, and I don't think it applies to anyone who is white.
On point five, I don't think you understand. There are parts of the world where having white skin will get you, quite literally, reminders every 15 minutes "hey it's really not safe for you here, do you want to hang out inside my shop while I call you a taxi?" No part of the US is like that for travelers. I know there are occasionally ICE raids that make the news, but "hey you strictly cannot be outside without a local chaperone" is just not a thing in the US.
She absolutely had people tell her every fifteen minutes she was not safe there and several offered to wait with her while she ordered a taxi.
Except none of the taxis ever came so she had to take a bus and a guy came with her just to make sure she didn’t try getting off at the wrong stop.
The cops were dressed like SWAT with what looked like full autos (but may not have been) and very forcefully told her she should not be there.
I wouldn't want my wife lost in Compton either but if the good guys outnumbered the bad guys by Inf% then it must not really be that bad. What would happen if it were Kinshasa instead of Compton.
Point 2: I was thinking that the most heavily armed private citizenry counts as "private security". More guns than people. Also far more private security guards than cops. To me that is exactly what "private security everywhere" looks like.
Point 4: To be honest i think point 3 actually applies to any place anywhere. Someone who knows the local police gets away with far more shit in my small german village. But "doesn't apply to anyone who is white" clearly is a sign of lack of rule of law. Laws should be race-independent and statistics show that in the US it's anything but.
Point 5: No chaperone-level warnings, but the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan all issue standing travel advisories about US gun violencem, the UK literally tells citizens "try not to walk through quieter areas alone, especially at night." And there were recommendations i got against business travel to the US especially with company issued equipment.
I mean, man, currently the US is not looking good from my point of view. I have a bunch of american friends who say immigration and everything else is ruining Germany. But looking at the stats it's looking quite okay:
Germany vs US: - Murder: 0.91 vs 5.7 per 100k
- Rape: 14 vs 40 per 100k
- Violent crime overall: 253 vs 380 per 100k
- Murder/homicide clearance: ~95% vs 50%
- Private security guard to police ratio: 0.9:1 vs 1.9:1
- Police killings: 10 vs 1100 per year
- Incarceration rate: 67 vs 600 per 100k
The highest incarceration rate in the developed world, ~4% of the world's population, ~25% of its prisoners. Are Americans just incredibly prone to being criminals? No. The crime rates above show the violent crime gap is ~1.5x, not 9x, and property crime is comparable or even lower than Germany's. ~95% of convictions are plea bargains extracted under threat of a "trial penalty", hundreds of thousands sit in jail pre-trial because they can't afford cash bail, and sentences run far longer for the same offenses. The US locks up 9x more people because it chooses to, not because Americans are more criminal. A state that imprisons its own population at Cuba and Rwanda rates while half its murders go unsolved, sells bail to the highest bidder, and runs on guilty pleas instead of trials. I would not correct anyone if they told me the US was not governed by the rule of law.
I doubt that most Americans comprehend what is living in a well managed citizens-first country were people are represented and many laws are passed just because the working class wants them.
If you compare the USA with the worst places on earth, then it is a good place. I hope that Americans aim higher and want to compare themselves with the best places to live in the world.
Switzerland has an excellent quality of life, far better education system, remarkable stability, and amazingly good healthcare. The companies pay people well, give them adequate time off, and has 16+ weeks of maternity leave.
There are some pretty significant downsides in Switzerland, too. It's highly conservative, hard to make friends with the Swiss, and fairly expensive, depending on where you live.
We live in Boston because of family. It's a decent enough place to live, and from my perspective, just about the closest that the US gets to Europe.
That seems like a good place to start looking.
(commissioned by the UN, polls are run by Gallup, report is put out by Oxford, and the editorial board is multinational and doesn't have any Nordic nationals; seems reasonably unbiased to me)
https://data.worldhappiness.report/table
It wasn't easy for me to interpret these rankings though, or how they came up with the life evaluation score. More explanation around that would have been helpful. The column headers have hover-descriptions, but they don't really say how the values were calculated.
Anyway - it does seem that Scandinavian countries are well represented at the top. That's not too surprising. Costa Rica at #4 is very unintuitive to me. Viet Nam at #1 for freedom is REALLY surprising to me, having visited there a number of times and having many Vietnamese friends. Likewise, The United States at 104 on freedom seems very weird.
That is true. I hope that people sees my comment as a push to do better, not a reason to give up. Things are never perfect, anywhere. And that's why we should continue pushing for more equality, defending the environment and making better the live of working class people.
The thing is, bar for success is simply higher than what US provides, and its not even that hard, just behave like a decent human being. The thing US provides if you don't have US passport is... not worth commenting on.
Precisely 0 of your presidents were ever punished for any action against citizens of other countries, despite starting aggressive wars, breaking peace and massacring people, or helping genocidares and war criminals escape justice, attacking international institutions that try to prevent that, etc.
You country of laws. :D
How many presidents were EVER punished for actions against citizens of other countries, unless other countries forced the president's country to do this (for example by winning a war)
Americans are not their government. Judging individuals based on the actions of their government is the type of ignorant behavior that breeds exactly the type of tribalism corrupt government officials are able to thrive in.
The one we're walking right now
I would also say that in this case it is quite clear he intended and knowingly did this so he could be charged under either law. They were asking him for his phone in connection to an alleged crime and he provided the password which erases the phone.
Second, you only have to be aware that the police consider your phone to be evidence of a crime, which he was aware of, not have knowledge about the crime itself.
I don't think you understand the situation.
The feds told him they suspected evidence to be on the phone. He can't plead ignorance. He knew they thought there was evidence of a crime and gave them the duress code.
If a person did not know the phone had potential evidence then he wouldn't have intended or knowingly destroyed evidence and as such wouldn't be guilty of the crime...
If you read the law you would know you have no clue what you are talking about.
> You were first talking about a person committing a crime and now you are talking about being aware of a crime.
You must have me confused with someone else then. All of my words RE: crime are as follows:
had a crime been charged
you've committed no crime
aware of a crime
you have committed no crime
charged with a crime
presuming guilt for the crime
At no time have I talked about someone who has committed a crime. Part of the reason for that is that legally speaking, no one has committed a crime, unless and until evidence and due process have established the fact. Being guilty of a crime is a non-existent condition before such time. (Obviously we can talk about such a condition in everyday conversation, but I'm talking about what goes in the public record.) This also means "the crime" does not exist and "the evidence" also does not exist, hence my initial question, evidence of what?
But a charge can exist, an assertion. The moment the charge is made by an officer of the court (or yes, even the suspicion and subsequent investigation), that is the moment when "ordinary personal property" turns into "evidence" subject to evidence-destruction laws. It is as simple as one person declaring it to be so. Given that this can happen for invalid reasons (such as wrongful accusation of someone as persecution for exercising his First Amendment rights as in this case), or for no reason at all, the potential for injustice is high. The fact that "knowingly" and "intent" are written into the laws is a good thing, but insufficient to make them just, in my opinion.
On a personal note, for you to be such a dick at the end of your comment is of course against the site guidelines but is also ironic given your own apparent inability to get my point (i.e. it's you who doesn't know what I'm talking about, not me), and your demonstrated cognitive inflexibility, poor reading skills and apparent inexperience with truths most Americans hold to be self-evident.
If a person did not know the phone had potential evidence then he wouldn't have intended or knowingly destroyed evidence and as such wouldn't be guilty of the crime...
He is not guilty of the crime, even today, and remains innocent unless and until due process establishes it.
Now to show you are moving the goal posts, go back to one of your previous posts and read "Had a crime been charged when the search was undertaken?" and another one "how are you supposed to know when your own property is evidence and when it's not, when you've committed no crime?"
You clearly were trying to make a claim that a crime needs to be charged to be destruction of evidence.
You are guilty of committing a crime regardless if you are found guilty. If I murder somebody and I am not found guilty in a court would you say I am not guilty of committing the crime of murder?
I'm not going to address anything else since it is a complete waste of time discussing this with you.
It's fine if you want to disengage; I've certainly had much more stimulating discussions, where it actually went somewhere, like a dance.
SCOTUS has overwhelmingly sided with the Administration. Not always, but quite often.
Not that I agree at all what happened.
The "Rule of Law" applies to everybody, including the President (recent decisions of the supreme court not withstanding - though they are very unfortunate). You have provisions for the freedom of press, freedom of speech, to be free from unreasonable searches, a reliable court system, etc, etc.
Searches at the border are murky legal territory, and I think that there is a problem here. You may also argue that the president and senate have too much power, or that gerrymandering is a serious problem (which it is). But from these you cannot conclude a general lawlessness.
(I'm from North-Western Europe, living in the US for a few decades now, so I feel that I have at least some data to compare.)
The 4th Amendment of the US Constitution is more legally relevant, but part of the function of courts is to carve out exceptions to laws like that for law enforcement purposes, so practically speaking such provisions are much less absolute than their wording tends to imply.
Constitutional Law > Statutory/Legislative Law > Administrative/Regulatory Law > Case Law/Common Law
A relevant example is the border search exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Your tech tricks are childish. Act like adults. Take responsibility, make decisions, take action, gather support.
Technological workarounds which leave federal agents unable to search my phone isn't gonna fix the slide into fascism. But it might make my trip back home more comfortable. Activism against fascism isn't gonna make my trip back home more comfortable. But it might play a role in fighting the slide into fascism.
Hell, activist work to fight the slide into fascism might be the reason why I would rather not have my phone search by federal agents at the airport.
Individual problem require individual solutions, systemic problems require systemic solutions, and both kinds of solutions are valuable because both kinds of problems are real. Most people make the mistake of proposing individual solutions to systemic problems. You make the mistake of dismissing individual solutions to individual problems.
(I have also intentionally ignored here whether these solutions will actually work. I'm guessing some could, most would not. "I ran out of battery on my phone and didn't bring a laptop, sorry" would probably work. Some complicated cryptographic setup which "technically doesn't erase the data but leaves it inaccessible" probably wouldn't work; the federal agent wouldn't recognize the difference.)
Don't take your phone and/or other devices you don't want to have searched. It's the advice routinely given to those planning a trip from the rest of the world to the US.
That stunt ten years ago failed for a reason.
What do you imagine the UN stands for? Let's not make the mistake of judging a program by its name or intention and not by its output. Mind you, this is the same UN on whose Human Rights Council sat such eminent proponents of human rights as Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Afghanistan, and Cuba.
Besides, the US historically funded about a third of the UN, out of 193 member states. It's farcical to suggest that the US is "actively hostile" to the thing that wouldn't even exist without its backing.
As to what specifically the U.S. has opposed…
The Vienna convention. ICESCR. CEDAW. UNCLOS. Basel convention. Migrant workers convention. Convention on biodiversity. Convention on rights of the child (even North Korea signed this one, but the U.S. opposed it, still does). Comprehensive test ban treaty. Ottawa, Rotterdam, and Stockholm conventions. Convention on cluster munitions. Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons (separate to the TBT). BBNJ/High seas treaty. Finally, the Paris agreement.
This isn’t even an exhaustive list. Just realised I forgot about the Rome statute and the ICC. Oh and the arms trade treaty. And the framework convention on climate change.
The UN is supposed to be a supranational authority over all nations. The U.S. views it as a blunt force instrument to use against others, but disregards its authority in almost all respects.
It’s even codified in the constitution, as passing a UN treaty requires a ⅔ majority of senators present, unlike any other type of legislation which just needs a legislative majority.
Finally, in January this year, the U.S. left 31 entities such as UNESCO, the WHO, and the HRC.
So, what part of reality is farcical to you?
It's not. It's mostly a U.S. institution. And those 31 entities that you mentioned are expensive and useless to Americans.
It is a moral statement, not a law.
The poster is arguing that the US is behaving in an immoral manner. The basis for their argument is the Declaration of Human Rights.
> It is a moral statement, not a law.
How do you figure that? Does the UN define morality for all peoples in the world? Evidently not. What moral weight is added to some text if some governments of some countries have voted for it?
Not even the votes of the majority one people group in their national home define morality, so the votes of the UN General Assembly definitely does not define morality.
What relevance does the common ground between countries have to morality? How does the common ground between Turkey and Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Russia and Ukraine, North Korea and South Korea, China and Japan "discover" morality? Countries almost by definition don't have common ground, the closest they have is contested ground. People may have common ground, but it's somewhat fanciful to suggest that the representatives of the 18 countries who drafted the UDHR somehow was in any position to act as the moral representatives even for the 18 countries they represented.
They were some diplomats, probably all thoroughly immoral people if we somehow ever manage to figure out what the word moral actually meant, which I doubt.
Can you elaborate on this process as you understand it? I just can't quite wrap my head around this. To me, it seems that at best this process will result in something that exactly no person in the world would recognize as moral. A bit like Solomon's proposal to split the baby.
How do you define morality if you think the UN can discover it? Is there any way to check their work? Can I do a test to see if they made a mistake as I can with any other scientific disciple which discovers things about our world? Does their work make some prediction that we can actually check against reality to see if it's true or false?
> The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Social progressives would strongly disagree.
> Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
Communists would strongly disagree.
> Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Several UN member states that are absolute monarchies would strongly disagree.
We could go on and on. The UDHR is just a distillation of the postwar liberal consensus, voted on by only 58 countries back in 1948. Hardly the stuff that moral authorities are made of.
Border searches aren't arbitrary. Sure, in the sense you may or may not get searched, but not in the sense that cops come and turn over your house for no reason. Crossing the border, you know some fraction of travellers will get searched, and that the government does so lawfully. Antagonising law enforcement in this situation is not a smart move, no matter how righteous you feel it is, unless you're doing it as some form of protest.
With that said, I do think searching phones is absolute bullshit, and I'm not arguing in favour of it at all.
>that the government does so lawfully
There are many legal question in this case, it's not clear the government acted lawfully. If he'd have arrived in a different federal court district, the search was unlawful because precedent says they need reasonable suspicion.
Not to mention this was a pretext to gather warrantless evidence for the FBI for a domestic investigation and nothing to do with securing the border.
>Antagonising law enforcement in this situation is not a smart move
Not what he did.
Maybe "antagonise" isn't the right word (ESL). By tricking the border agent into wiping the device, you have made him annoyed / angry / look foolish etc. No matter how much you are in the right, you have now given this person, with the power to create a lot of problems for you, the motivation to do so. You have to weigh that against coming home to your wife and children, in time for dinner. That's not fair, but that's reality.
Or maybe you crossed the border, with the intent to create this situation, to get it tried in court. More power to you.
About five years ago, here in Denmark, the government decided that freedom of assembly no longer applied. An activist decided to hold a party for about 10 people, including his lawyer, called the police on himself, and live streamed the whole thing. I can't find whatever became of that case, because search engines can no longer search. His name is Lars Andersen. He's been jailed a lot of times for petty bullshit.
There's no deception required to protect sensitive data or avoid the seizure of an expensive phone. Consent to unlocking the phone, refuse to unlock the drive. The drive gets seized and you go on your way (if you're a US citizen entering the USA).
Some time ago, Android with a custom recovery could come close to that, but it was fussy and as far as I know, no longer viable. Increased use of TPMs for storing credentials seems to be at least one of the reasons.
One of the laws that's enforced pretty well in the USA is the protection against unreasonable search. Most of the time, a search requires showing a judge evidence that the search is more likely than not to reveal evidence of a crime. Exceptions are narrow and specific; the government's options to punish someone who refuses to decrypt data at the border are limited to brief detention and seizure of the medium.
Not yet tested is the idea that erasing data on the spot satisfies the purpose of the border search exception, which is to prevent importation of things that are illegal to import. This case might address that question.
Edit to add that its also more difficult than it should be to protect and exercise the right against unreasonable search. If a cop knocks on your door its a consent-based interaction. You can simply not respond, but if you do happen to crack the door they can and will look in for any signs to claim as probable cause. Further there are cases where a person stepped out to talk and when they turned around and walked inside the cop slid right in behind them and later claimed in court the open door was implied consent. (I don't have a link to the court docs unfortunately.)
And there are also many instances of the city being sued, those cops being sued, losing qualified immunity, losing their jobs, etc, because we do still have recourse when cops do the wrong thing.
If your rights were violated, you stand to get a big payout, and get the cops fired that violated your rights. We aren't powerless, yet.
--------
A federal court denies qualified immunity when an officer’s conduct violates a clearly established constitutional right or when material facts remain heavily disputed for a jury. While appellate and district courts routinely evaluate these claims, absolute lists contain thousands of entries because denials typically happen at the lower or circuit court levels rather than as sweeping national precedent.[0]
Notable Federal and Supreme Court Cases Denying Immunity
Taylor v. Riojas (2020): The U.S. Supreme Court summarily reversed a lower court and denied qualified immunity to correctional officers who housed an inmate in shockingly filthy, human-waste-packed cells for days, ruling that the extreme conditions-violating the Eighth Amendment-needed no prior identical precedent.[1]
King v. Brownback (Sixth Circuit): The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied qualified immunity to members of a joint law enforcement task force after they aggressively tackled and beat an innocent man (James King) outside a convenience store when they mistook him for a suspect.[2]
Schroeder v. City of Des Moines (2022): The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that three police officers were not entitled to qualified immunity after conducting an unlawful, suspicionless car stop and subsequent arrest based on an unverified temporary license plate.[3]
Glover v. City of Jackson (2024): A federal district court famously rejected a detective’s qualified immunity defense in a major civil rights action involving fabricated evidence and malicious prosecution, highlighting systemic flaws in the doctrine itself.[4]
[0] - https://ij.org/press-release/massive-new-study-reveals-that-...
[1] - https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/qualified-imm...
[2] - https://ij.org/case/king-v-brownback/
[3] - https://iowaappeals.com/uncategorized/three-des-moines-polic...
[4] - https://eji.org/news/federal-court-denies-qualified-immunity...
I am not familiar with the case, but from my reading IJ is still trying to fight the immunity.
> Instead, the high court asked the Sixth Circuit to decide the issue first. Rather than seriously engaging with the issue, as the Supreme Court asked, the Sixth Circuit unthinkingly applied outdated caselaw, becoming the sixth federal appeals court to do so. Now, IJ is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in and deny the government one of its many tools to avoid the Constitution
Not really, the data points the other way. Cops basically never have to actually pay for their wrongdoings. Over 99.98% of money successfully recovered from cases against police is paid out by the cities, not cops personally [1]. A considerable number of cops that are fired are also eventually rehired by the same department [2] or a different one [3]. So I don't think it's that clear that you "have recourse when cops do the wrong thing".
[1] https://nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NYULawRe...
[2] https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol74/iss4/4/
[3] https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/GrunwaldRappaportArticle_s6br...
Note I also didn't say the problem is rampant. I take issue that its possible at all, and that it isn't a 100% success rate of holding police to account, especially when most are required to wear body cameras today.
Sure, but there are also many instances today of evidence getting thrown out in court due to cops not getting a warranty and poisoning the tree and all its fruit. Rights don't just enforce themselves, there are and have to be a number of layers to the onion to help reduce the violation numbers at each stage.
Say they search a vehicle without consent or probable cause and find weed. Then they further investigate the person and find additional evidence they otherwise never would have found. That weed find may get thrown out but it doesn't always nullify the rest of the case, and if the DA is clever they simply wouldn't submit the weed as evidence at all.
A cop pulls you over for a brake light. They decide to go fishing, asking where you're coming from or where you're going, looking for any inconsistency to pull on. Maybe they decide they smell something on your breath.
A well informed person would refuse to ask questions and help ensure the traffic stop can move forward with the ticket, the cop isn't allowed to hold you for longer than required for the initial offense.
Most people when asked questions, though, will answer. Most people asked to take a field sobriety test will oblige. None of that is required and all requires consent - the cop knows that and knows that few people will stand up for that.
Such fishing expeditions should be illegal and anything found should be considered inadmissible due to unreasonable search. When the professional trained in law knows that they can game the average person it should be unreasonable practice.
Border patrol doesn't get immunity from the constitution and my need to reenter the country is not probably cause for a Terry stop and search of my phone.
then consider this paired with the implementation of mass data sharing between the alphabet agencies, surveillance data sharing from private companies like Amazon Ring, Flock, Clearview, etc. and NSPM-7 ordering agencies to create JTTFs to target organizations like BLM
then consider the unmitigated use of force by federal law enforcement agencies like ICE
I think if this were 1995 your point might be fair but those days are unfortunately long gone
Iceland still has the best data protection laws in the world, afaik
"In United States criminal law, the border search exception is a doctrine that allows searches and seizures at international borders and their functional equivalent without a warrant or probable cause. Generally speaking, searches within 100 miles (160 km) of the border are more permissible without a warrant than those conducted elsewhere in the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
213 milion people live in this zone.
> In a full banana republic, technical compliance with the law will not prevent consequences for failing to do what the authorities want. In a jurisdiction with perfect rule of law, it always will.
I think you may be misunderstanding that many laws, even in fair, just societies, are intentionally designed to be flexible. The real world is so variable and messy that in many cases it isn't feasible for a law to be written such it can be unambiguously determined whether or not a specific action violated the law. Laws often rely on humans using context to judge whether something violates the spirit of a law, and in a just society, this is a good thing.
My point is that I don't believe the idea of "perfect rule of law" is sensible. Law is always necessarily a bit fuzzy and nebulous.
The alternative is complying with the spirit of the law, which is an eternal guessing game. Who knows whether it's legal or not, we have to wait for the Supreme Court to decide what Congress _actually_ meant. It implies that the law means something beyond what anybody bothered to actually write down, and nobody has any idea what that is until the Judiciary interprets it into "actual law".
Americans aren't standing up against this, but they might have considerably more interest if the government was instead trying to ban encrypting data in cloud storage for everyone.
There's also just the fact it's ridiculous I can't have a spare phone ready to go in a few minutes and get it back exactly as I left it.
Substitute cloud storage for a USB stick if you do it at your departure hotel.
There are absolutely technical solutions to the implementations of tyranny. Otherwise we wouldn’t bother with encryption. Violence can’t solve math problems.
Like whatever arbitrary thing they decide it should look like that day.
I'm serious, this is the law in Germany. It's also a great demonstration of a shitty law that people prefer to avoid complying with, which surely has something to do with the topic.
the government would have no ability to access the data if he didnt bring it on his person here.
hell, he could have just continued to not given his password and left his phone with them, too.
Inc. hiding by leaving it your home country?
The transfer and backup system are pretty much the same mechanisms.
Restoring is probably order of ~1 hour to go through all the setup. Then some hours to sync any data and updates that need to be redownloaded, apps reinstalled, etc.
It’s harder for people who don’t use cloud services and have to do things like copy TOTP seeds, but in this scenario you want those to live on a Yubikey with a PIN anyway.
It's the same thing. They punched in a code, they are presented with a wiped phone. Can they prove the guy gave them a distress password and wasn't simply carrying a wiped phone to begin with? No, but they just need to imply that is the reason to charge him with the felony.
It doesn't even care about plausible deniability.
Best you can get away with is lack of suspicion. Have a secondary phone with some standard apps on that you use now and then so theyhave a history and just look like you are just not a technical person and read novels on dead trees instead. A lot of work but likely works.
In other words, the HN crowd.
They don't get any indication that there was data there to be deleted, and you don't just factory reset but flash w an image of a clean phone that's been used. It has apps, it has accounts, it looks to the untrained eye (because that's who's looking at it) like a phone that was used normally by someone who has done nothing wrong.
> It's the same thing. They punched in a code, they are presented with a wiped phone.
No, the behavior between the two is in fact visibly and obviously different.
The regular passcode unlocks the phone. The duress passcode reboots the phone and resets it. I know this because this is literally what previous articles said happened when they entered the passcode in regards to this case.
See for yourself:
But it's irrelevant in this case because the guy confessed.
When you enter the duress code, you get an animation while it resets, and then it reboots to a factory reset state.
It is directly observable which code was entered. You can claim that it was something else, but your claim is easily dismissed as bullshit.
This was exactly what was observed and recorded by the officials in this case.
How is this any different than refusing to unlock the phone? It just seems you've added unnecessary extra steps.
The whole problem as I see it is that people for some reason submit all their life to a device they can not control. And when it bites them they go all suprised.
It's worth noting wiping a device shortly before an anticipated search could also be considered destruction of evidence in the same way. It doesn't have to be done after a request for the data to be considered that.
> There's no deception required to protect sensitive data or avoid the seizure of an expensive phone. Consent to unlocking the phone, refuse to unlock the drive. The drive gets seized and you go on your way (if you're a US citizen entering the USA).
This was likely the best move for him to take. They could have held him for a while and wasted his time but eventually would have had to give him access to a lawyer and let him go. Unless they had a recording of him entering a PIN/password, they were nearly certainly not going to get his data from it. He very likely didn't gain anything from wiping it.
He did help every GrapheneOS user by spreading awareness of the duress PIN/password. It was designed around an adversary aware of it and therefore not wanting to attempt using a PIN/password obtained via coercion. In the future, we want to integrate the feature into the secure element rate limiting for key derivation so it can't be avoided by exploiting the OS.
The backup tool on GrapheneOS doesn't work for a large percentage of app data. And it often silently fails to backup some data, so you don't even know where the gaps are.
There have been promises of a better solution for years, but I haven't seen any movement yet.
"My patients survive most of the time and when they don't I get notifications"
Look, if we are talking about a warranted search in the US then I'd agree with you. However, the entire point of CPB's unwarranted search authority is to stop contraband from coming in.
This would be like arguing that throwing away materials illegal in the US before boarding a plane is destruction of evidence.
Like, even if we assume exactly what CBP's claim is true, it was to stop CSAM. And the person had in fact had CSAM. Destroying the CSAM before getting to the US would be legal even though the US doesn't like it.
Further, if the data is actually backed up, then you haven't actually destroyed it and CBP or another agency can provide you with a search warrant for what they are looking for. But I'd note that this is far outside of CBP's authority. They are for stopping contraband, not FBI work.
The only reason they can charge him with this is that he destroyed it after being notified that it was being seized. If he has deleted it before then there would be nothing they could charge him with.
And the whole reason they wanted in his phone (the real reason) was to figure out who he worked with in the stop cop city protest. That's why he was really targeted in the first place.
You're always been able to backup and restore your iPhone to your local Windows PC or a Mac using free first party software from Apple.
… yeah I doubt that nowadays honestly
Backing up and restoring an iPhone is extremely easy. You don't need to imagine all of this flash drive or encrypted imaging stuff. You plug it into your computer and do a backup. You can then wipe the phone through the menus. Restoring from the same computer is easy.
in before those fucking "I hAvE nOtHiNg tO hIdE" twats
CBP: Customs & Border Protection
Point being that relying on a hidden trick (rather than encryption) is a very risky bet.
You can still do it on modern Android devices, as long as the bootloader is unlocked. Yes, the file system is encrypted, but a modern custom recovery is able decrypt and mount it.
- non-US Samsung phones
- Most Sony, HTC, Motorola are unlocked
- Chinese brands like Xiaomi
Not all Pixels are unlocked; carrier-bought US phones are usually OEM locked.
Not by default, but you have to enable it in developer settings, and then it does a full wipe, so if you plan to root your phone anyway, you do that when you buy it (buy, test hardware, oem unlock + factory reset, root, actually start using).
I have my passwords on proton pass with 2fa. I back my pics to private cloud storage. I keep 2fa backup codes in my wallet.
Wiping the phone on a whim is a minor inconvenience. Full image restoration would be neat.
At the border you have the same right to refuse to provide the pin/password on boot of your otherwise encrypted phone as you do to refuse to provide the key for an encrypted USB. (That right differs slightly depending on whether you are a US citizen or not).
What the subject in question of this new story did was cause the border official to inadvertently destroy the evidence on the phone and therefore indirectly destroyed the evidence himself.
(I'm not making a commentary as to whether or not it's a valid charge and criticism, or not. I'm just saying that's the material difference between your scenario and the original scenario)
This isn’t my territory, so excuse my ignorance, but I’d love to know how
There could be issues with the TPM chips, having to re-enroll fingerprints or something, but not a problem in the case of a border search, since they can't pull out anything. So you could backup your whole system, install a clean ubuntu without anything special on the system (just if they check), and then download the image wherever you are and do whatever you want.
So on a Luks encrypted xubuntu, o can dd to an external and then my laptop can fall in a lake the next day and I run some simple command to unwind that on a fresh laptop and I’m off to the races?
I presume it’s much slower than rsync, since it’s comprehensive each time.
Are there any gotchas?
This sounds too simple to be true—but again, my knowledge on backup is very unprofessional
The problem with dd is, that you can't really run it on a running system, because stuff is constantly being written to the drive (this is same for rsync too, but usualy the damage is smaller), so you have to boot a live linux from usb, dd the whole drive to an external drive, and then after swimming ashore, boot a live linux on the new laptop, and dd the backup to the new drive.
The "secure enclaves" and other related stuff have made this harder in the recent years.
eg,
i have very interesting empirical evidence that recent Anthropic models are specifically trained to refuse to critique the whitehouse cabinet and elected officials, and that this is in fact an artifact of post training rather than prompts. (its very interesting when you get opus 5 to do the correct ethical evaluation and then its like "i'm slipping back to false balance.... its in my weights....." metaphorically speaking)
likewise, i think the current white house should go die in a fire.
is that activism? someone can be an activist and not be equipped for unplanned legal escalations.
also waiting for the courts to fix things isnt activism if you want to protect people at all the next 2 years at current trajectories :( fixing shit is activism, letting others take the flack, not activism.
Buying eggs at the grocery store.
You might be too familiar with "activism" as a perjurative but it needn't be one. Gaining visibility to your case by the media reporting on an arrest is sometimes seen as a plus (ex. Rosa Parks).
I'm not personally much of that mindset because the media didn't de-segregate the buses. It was black people literally just never taking them until it de-segregated that did.
i lol'd, but is there an unwoke region of cascadia?
Does it suck that that's what it takes to get people to seriously engage with an issue? Sure. But if that weren't the case the issues that need addressing probably wouldn't arise in the first place. People need the consequences to be presented in clear, stark, human terms, to cut through the caucauphony of rhetoric.
Do people generally regard it as a perjurative? I always assumed it ranged from neutral to positive. I do wonder how off my calibration is sometimes.
Just nitpicking, the word is "pejorative". Kind of a funny mix-up in context, though. (Perjurative would be related to lying under oath.)
Some judges have plainly bent the knee. Some have gone the opposite. Some actually follow the intent of the law. Some follow it to the letter.
Like everywhere else.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) was the SCOTUS case that declared if you were born in the US you were a citizen. You think Mr. Ark was okay from harassment after this case was ruled in his favor? Less than 3 years later he would be held in Texas while local authorities tried to deport him under the Chinese Exclusion Act ignoring his previous ruling (that was national news, and they'd be fully aware of).
Then after winning his freedom, that he was already granted, he was arrested again in SF where they tried to deport him as well. Then after getting released, for something that he has already proven twice now, he went back to China and never returned to the US.
Institutions do not stop authoritarians.
For a hundred years whenever an uppity black man or Northern activist crossed the Mason-Dixie line a KKK sherrif was waiting for them.
You don't actually have to jail people- you just have to make their life miserable. At that point your adversary will either shut up or emigrate. Anyone who speaks out against Trump or the GOP is going to be targeted.
And the court gets to assume that whatever was on that phone hurts your case, regardless of whether or not it did.
It would've been better if he'd crossed the border with a phone already factory reset and just restore it after entry.
I could see arguments for both, either, or neither but I imagine both are considered spoilage.
As soon as a lawful search is requested, situation has changed. The only question then is if you comply or not. If you remove the ability for that search to take place then how that happened is irrelevant. Destroying a secret key is no different to zeroing a blob of data. Actually the first might be worse. If the key is somehow recoverable (eg you have a copy on a cloud drive) then you can have ongoing penalties by refusing to comply.kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
The only thing that matters is the lawful request. Whatever you do up to that point is treated differently compared to what you do after.
You might say: what if I add a deadman's switch where I have to type in a code every 72 hours to stop it wiping itself? Your thought process might be that this is passive. It doesn't matter. As soon as the request is made and you refuse to hit that switch knowing the phone will wipe, legally it's no different. You have destroyed potential evidence when faced with a lawful search.
This is what I mean when I say stop looking for loopholes or technical compliance. It does not matter.
> (a)Destruction or Removal of Property To Prevent Seizure.—
> Whoever, before, during, or after any search for or seizure of property by any person authorized to make such search or seizure, knowingly destroys, damages, wastes, disposes of, transfers, or otherwise takes any action, or knowingly attempts to destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, transfer, or otherwise take any action, for the purpose of preventing or impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody or control or to continue holding such property under its lawful custody and control, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
Now what I think you're asking about is "adverse inference". In civil cases, the courts get to assume the evidence lost hurt you. In criminal trials it's a little more complicated but can show up as, for example, jury instructions. The court is allowed to instruct the jury that they can presume that the destroyed evidence was harmful to the defendant.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
“The border” has similarly been extended to cover the majority of the US population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception#/map/0 Yes, according the the US government warrantless border searches apply in West Virginia. (Map from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception)
Further, in what way is the content of someone’s cellphone relevant at a border specifically? Inspecting luggage for cocaine at an entry point makes sense, but physical borders mean little in the face of the internet. You might as well just erase the phone before crossing the border.
If you’re expecting the Courts to bail him out, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The gov’t can make an argument here this is like trying (and succeeding) at flushing, say, a bag of cocaine in the bathroom when you see the cops coming.
Something which the Courts also historically disapprove of, by the way.
Routine border searches are largely permitted under the 4th Amendment. This is settled law.
Yes, it took decades, but in Australia our various states have worked through the "it's criminal" -> "It's criminal but not enforced" -> "we're deliberately vague and won't prosecute doctors" -> "we have a legal framework that makes abortion legal up to {20,22,24} weeks on demand, after which it requires the consensus of two independent medical opinions".
The US needs to do the same. Yes, it will take decades. No, it shouldn't because abortion is a medical procedure, but religion is a scourge.
How do you reconcile your 'nakedly partisan' theory with the court rulings that, for example, overruled Trumps attempt to use the AEA for immigration enforcement, overruled his attempt to deploy the National Guard without the consent of state governments, overruled his attempts to unilaterally impose tariffs, overruled his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, and so on?
Things like birthright citizenship are a good example of that latter concept: the law is extremely clear there so they ruled against him because the only alternative would be declaring outright that the President is not bound by the constitution, but in many other cases they’ve made quite unusual actions to preempt lower courts before either finding a new executive power or, where the law is clear, stalling to allow things like deportations to proceed in the interim before ruling against.
Even random border searches are permitted according to our jurisprudence.
He could have refused search without a warrant, intentionally destroying evidence is a different legal matter.
If you destroy evidence, that’s your own fault. You can’t blame law enforcement for inducing you to commit crimes they didn’t ask you to commit. That’s just silly and no court will entertain that theory.
To protect your rights under the 4th Amendment, you refuse the search. If law enforcement conducts the search anyway and a court finds the search was unlawful, the court will exclude the evidence found in the search from consideration in the trial along with any evidence that flows from that. Neither the jury nor the court will be able to use it.
First, you frequently require a judge's permission to even argue it.
But the real burden is showing that your client would not have committed the crime without the effect of the police. A cop posing as a drug dealer and offering you drugs as you pass them in the park every day doesn't count; a cop hounding you for months to commit wire fraud because they mistakenly believe you're in a criminal org might, though.
“Entering the country while in possession of a device storing binary data” isn’t a crime.
(IAAL, not legal advice, consult your own lawyer)
Where’d you get that idea? That’s not the law. As soon as there is reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, and the law enforcement encounter occurs, that’s the threshold for when preservation of evidence begins. It doesn’t matter whether it might not have ultimately resulted in a criminal charge. You cannot intentionally interfere with a lawful investigation, in any way, full stop.
Also note that Miranda rights are not constitutional rights.
This guy requested not to proceed without his lawyer present several times, with no result.
It seems to be more true than it did a couple of decades ago, what with more recent rulings like US v. Cotterman and US. v. Koluz better clarifying what counts as a routine border searches vs. more in-depth "forensic" searches that require individual suspicion.
you'll find it's the same people
Certainly not. But, of course, something can only be evidence in relation to a specific crime that is being investigated. If you aren't already a suspect in a crime, then the data on your phone wasn't evidence in the first place.
And unreasonable is open to interpretation.
This was backed up with even more rulings like US v. Kolusz in the Fourth Circuit. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on this specific question, but has issued other general rulings about cell phone data, like Riley v. California, which determined that data on a cell phone is protected by the Fourth Amendment against warrantless search and seizure.
If the case in the article makes its way up to SCOTUS, it's not unreasonable to expect that the court will combine multiple districts' established precedent that "forensic searches" are not covered by any border exception with its own recent precedent protecting cell phone data, and rule that demanding unrestricted access to phone data without reasonable suspicion is unconstitutional.
[1] https://veracrypt.io/en/Wear-Leveling.html
https://veracrypt.io/en/Trim%20Operation.html
[2] https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2082153517234676150#m
(That of course only takes down the "physically impossible" part.)
I also wish that GrapheneOS link didn't say a duress PIN forces the attacker to think twice about entering a PIN, knowing it could wipe the device. It doesn't do that for anyone aware of its existence, since of course the attacker can prevent the secure element from sending a delete command to the flash chip. Obviously if you know the device could attempt to delete itself you would break that feature before sending the code to the secure element...
With deniability, isn't the idea that you would have unlocked the false partition to show that you have nothing on your phone, therefore it's not encrypted?
It doesn't matter if the false partition is unlocked or not - you can plausibly deny there's anything on the phone at all.
The secure element has built-in storage protected against tampering. It doesn't rely on external storage. Having support for the duress PIN/password built into the secure element rate limiting would force an attacker to risk wiping it unless they have a secure element exploit. If they have a secure element exploit then they don't need any attempts for a typical PIN since they could quickly brute force it. That's the planned design of the feature once we have the ability to extend the secure element functionality.
If they can exploit a secure element then only a decent passphrase is secure. GrapheneOS does make using a decent to strong passphrase much more convenient and memorable but it isn't what most people use in practice.
For example, documents like this[1] document any features that law enforcement should be aware of.
[1] https://www.swgde.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/2025-08-21-...
They’re GenXers and Millennials who grew up with this shit and would likely see the bullet point in the press release. Would not be shocked if large departments have someone on retainer or staff to track tech updates
HN crowd continues to display a complete lack of awareness that society moved on from this crowds 15 minutes of fame that was the 2010s
I added it after users asked me to solve their problem of being strip searched like this.
I know some people keep crypto wallet keys in the vaults. Someone else wrote me that they carry sensitive documents they don’t want to be exposed.
IMO the correct solution is to erase your phone before crossing the border, and then restore it after you’ve crossed
The issue here is only that he deleted it after they started an investigation.
The legal eagle video in the post says this explicitly that he would've been fine if he had wiped his phone prior to the flight.
This comment assumes rule of law (a.k.a. a government constrained by laws).
What if what we instead had was a government secretly tracking a dissident they didn't like, then searching them with a pretext and no legal justification.
What would have likely happened in that case, is that the government accuses him of destroying evidence anyways, because they're mad the search didn't turn up anything incriminating, and his life gets ruined fighting against their retaliation for years, with no consequences for the actual offenders.
Does the GPS trail of your running app show you were at a protest site? Better remember to remove that as well. What about all the photos you took on your trip - there’s location metadata in there. Maybe the messenger app stripped that out, but what about the one picture you sent by email - is that still in your offline Sent folder?
You only need to delete the necessary key. The 'actual' data should just look like random bits.
"PAGINA INTERDETTA DAL CENTRO NAZIONALE PER IL CONTRASTO DELLA PEDOPORNOGRAFIA ONLINE (C.N.C.P.O.)"
“PAGE BLOCKED BY THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR COMBATING ONLINE CHILD PORNOGRAPHY (C.N.C.P.O.)”
Oh, we live in an interesting age.
(That's one of the reasons why it's trivially easy for foreign visitors to China to bypass the Great Firewall.)
If you were on wifi, that's notably interesting.
If you have DoH configured at either OS or browser level then you will not see a message: the site will either work, or it will error out if the IP is blocked.
If you are using an alternative DNS provider over unencrypted DNS then either outcome is possible.
You are nonetheless talking about the .ph - only that.
And: italy has done much, much, 1000000 orders much worse (Gutenberg).
Use 1.1.1.1 or something else and tell Mrs. Meloni to go suck eggs.
Something like that should be a standard feature of a secure phone.
This isn't the case, but if that rule also applied to airports, then I wonder what portion of the population is safe.
Since we’re techies we tend to think about technological nuances and have a certain literal frame of mind (eg “They can’t make it illegal for me to just type the wrong pin” is the type of thinking I’m talking about here) whereas in law weird precedents and your intent really matter so you really need expert advice and either way, you are throwing yourself at the mercy of a stochastic process that depends on a bunch of fallible humans along the way many of whom have the power to make your life extremely miserable.
Technicalities of destroying the data vs destroying the key to the data, destroying the data when you have a backup etc may matter a lot to us but may not mean anything in an actual judicial process depending on how it goes.
It seems to me if you have data you don’t want subject to seizure at a border it is best not to travel over the border carrying that data. If you have a backup (in your scenario), why not restore your phone from that backup after you have travelled, and not cross the border with anything that is likely to be a problem if seized? Then you’re not putting yourself at risk from this process.
see the colored bits essay for an ur-example of this
Say you carry a valise with a lock. They ask for the key, you truthfully answer that you do not have with you. They burn the valise and lose all the contents.
So, are you in jail? or can you sue them for destroying your stuff?
In real life they would break the lock on your valise and return it to you bound together with tape.
- did you intend for the data to be destroyed in an eventual search?
- probably yes, because you went to the trouble to set up a duress password
- is it reasonably that you mixed up the two passwords? No, because only an idiot would make them similar and you're clearly no idiot, because you were able to set up a phone with a duress password.
- hence, you intentionally made the officer wipe your data, and you will be held liable.
It doesn't make any difference if the destroyed potential evidence is physical or digital.
The law as written is stupid, but that does not mean courts are stupid.
It is rather funny to look at how some programmers believe they can "trick" the law. It does not work like computer code!
The law is not “hackable.” Ultimately people are making decisions about guilt and punishment. And judges really, really don’t take kindly to defendants who think they’re trying to outsmart the court.
It absolutely is. The rich and powerful do it all the time.
Although bribery is a felony in itself
> it’s the system working as intended.
Maybe it is
The problem is that the Constitution is broken, and has been since it was drafted. The right to bear arms probably should be conditioned on something more clear than the necessity of a well regulated militia (whatever the hell that means) to the security of a free state. The requirements for warrants probably ought to be weakened somewhat at border crossings. But the plain text of the Constitution does not allow this. The plain text contains no exceptions, and does not empower Congress to make exceptions. But changing the Constitution is hard, so rather than go through this slow, arduous process, everyone just punts the problem to the Court and says, "You deal with it." And so they do. The Court just does end-runs around the Constitution for defensible and practical reasons. But this doesn't change the fact that it is doing end-runs around the Constitution.
The point the sibling comments miss is that for the hoi polloi, this one-weird-trick does not work because such laws has been written to broaden the scope as much as possible by heavily relying on intent instead of the micro mechanics (which keep changing) AND the enforcers focus on the intent. For the rich and wealthy, the law may be the same but the enforcement is wildly different because they absolutely have the enforcers on their side. I bet such people don't get strip searched like the unwashed masses as they roll off their private jets.
But there are often vaguer higher level principles that can stop the fun, involving concept like "reasonable person" and "good faith" which are interpreted by humans. But this also doesn't happen always. Sometimes people do get away on technicalities, though many may suspect corruption in those cases, but sometimes the law is indeed powerless against certain novel tricks. There is no general answer.
People here thinks in technicalities and what if, and while technicalities apply in legal cases, they're not like a lot of people here think they work (quite the contrary!)
This is not "well if the gov had a quantum computer they could decode" this is not how the legal world decided things.
One thing this case makes me wonder is if the government would have a problem with someone walking across the border with a completely virgin phone. They must have wiped it, right? Would they try to prosecute? How could they possibly know the defendant in this case actually had anything on his phone before the duress code was entered?
Well, once you have been told to unlock the device, you're already in a legally binding process. The phone is at this point evidence. It was not evidence before. It was not evidence a month ago. It really is just that simple.
Now, they could view prior wipe as suspicious, but as a US citizen they cannot prevent entry. And they may be able to seize your phone(suspicious!). Which is why simply stating the truth politely "I believe in privacy, and loath government poking into the private affairs of citizens" might help down the road if you want to sue. Might.
Border guards protect the realm, after all, and have wide latitude.
From my side, my truthful argument for wipe has always been that all of my buisness clients, emails, data might be on my phone. I have a duty to protect their privacy.
Making reasonable statements takes the edge off of 'suspicious', and the more people who wipe? The less suspicious it becomes.
The biggest thibg anyone could do, is make 100% restorable backups for non-rooted Android a thing. It's doable, but a PITA right now. Make it one-click, perfect, reliable, and more will do it.
And then it isn't unusual, it's normal, and the suspicious elements vanishes.
Of course, as Google is mired in asshattery lately, I'd expect any attempts to protect us all, such as ASOP patches or bug reports, would be fought against and ignored. Helping the world, protecting travellers, political dissidents, not on their radar.
They even fight such things.
Because in this day and age, Google does not have your back. Instead, they shove knives there.
From a factual point of view, rather than the narrow legal one offered, it is not materially different to delete a phone in anticipation of a future search. In most cases, outside the customs context, it's just harder for the government to prove obstruction of justice.
What's different here is that the government only had a right to search the phone in relation to the border, and the government used that right not just to search for contraband like the law anticipates. If someone dumped their contraband and made it disappear before actually crossing a border, would that be an evidence-related crime? What if they thought about a contraband conspiracy, and then intentionally forgot? What if the customs office presented a form to all travelers, well in advance of formal screening, that they must preserve their contraband henceforth? And then they decided not to smuggle it? Interesting questions legally, but factually, considering criminal charges in those scenarios over the evidentiary situation would be pretty silly.
So then, when you delete purportedly contraband data at the border, have you really just done a public service of removing one more potentially contraband item from border inspection? Or is it that once any of us create data in the vicinity of a border or in a context where we might approach a border in the future with the access device or storage medium, do we all have a duty to preserve it for inspection until the customs authorities get around to inspecting us? Or is it just that this series of hypotheticals illustrate that we have here an epic mash-up of misinterpretation here?
I mean really, this act is exceptionally blunt, clear, and overt. All this hand waving won't change things.
In none of my scenarios am I describing actions to be taken after you have been told to unlock the phone. I’m talking about before you ever approach the border. There is no functional difference between wiping a key which encrypts the entire device (but leaving the encrypted data in place) vs wiping the entire device, from a security point of view, except one requires twiddling fewer bits to restore the data.
My point is that the law is unable to see that equivalence, but it is also unable to compel a different result. If choice A and B are identical for security purposes but the government can technically prosecute A but not B, all they have accomplished is forcing people to choose B.
It's exceptionally apparent you've caused destructive behaviour, after the phone is in evidence.
None of the other scenarios, show your duress pin factory resetting the device, then dropping into a setup screen, after the border agent confiscated it. So much of tbe law is intent, coupled with knowledge of your situation.
There's nothing new here really. Throw a diary into the fireplace at home? Fine! Travel with a blank diary? Fine!
Grqb it from a border guard and and rip it up? Trouble.
It's not about the state of the device at the border. It's intent to change the state after confiscation.
In all your scenarios, you would not be charged with this crime. They may seize the device, but not charge you.
I believe the duress password reboots the phone. They likely know this, hence the different outcome.
Convictions at trial are much lower.
There are ~4x as many cases dismissed by judges before getting to trial. And the vast majority (90%) of defendants enter into plea bargains.
Prosecutors only bring charges when they feel they have a strong case. There are many many cases which are never pursued because of this, and people also get upset about that.
Many countries do not have a plea bargain system the way the US does. And if you look at conviction rates at trial, they are smack in line with much of e.g. Western Europe.
At some point the high conviction rate acts as a deterrent from not entering a plea. IMHO this is the case in the US and has been for quite some time.
What does lead to pleas is the expense of defending a case: if you acknowledge some guilt, you might decide to accept a lesser charge rather than exhaust your finances with no guarantee that you won’t get that lesser charge anyway.
1. Intent matters. If you give the password to a Customs and Border Protection agent which deletes all the data, your intent was to deceive them and either delete evidence, or at least fail to comply with their request. CBP has wide powers of search.
2. CBP has broad remit to deny entry to any non-citizen for any and no reason. Even if not illegal to provide a duress password, they can and will send non-citizens back home.
(I used to do some travel patterns where taking a certain client laptop wasn’t an option. It was an absolute gigantic pain for the type of work I did, but it was just too risky to have a laptop seized and be expected to input credentials.)
It's actually been on the books for a while (decades at least) that customs can search you at the border without a warrant even if you are a citizen.
This case seems to have become a big 'Trump bad' poster child (people are calling the US East Germany in these comments...), but if this exact scenario happened at least in the last two decades (I found an example upholding the searches from 2004) then it would at least be possible to charge them with deleting evidence. Even this probably would have been nothing if he refused to give up his password, not being required to provide a password has been upheld for years. They can seize your phone for some time but I'm unsure on the times they ask and then just let you move on when they find out your a citizen.
Now you know you know, so use a pin
The important wrinkle is that CBP’s published policy expressly guarantees that a person being admitted as a U.S. citizen won’t be denied entry solely because CBP couldn’t inspect the device. It doesn’t give lawful permanent resident (green card holders) that same explicit statement. Instead, it says refusal by a “foreign national” can be considered in an admissibility determination.
When interacting with border officials (or any LEOs, for that matter), be polite, don't get hostile or aggressive, but also be firm and don't volunteer any information that you're not required to give.
Sad that we have to accept this as a risk of international travel, but here we are.
Morality and direct commonsense interpretations of law do not apply when there are literally unlimited resources stacked against you. But, assuming you can wait the potential ~10y to receive your device back that it will take to get your device returned to you, good on you. If you think that the current SCOTUS will rule in your favor, good on you.
The reality is, we live in a time where the most horrendous interpretation of the law is the one that will happen. And it won’t be in your favor.
My bad.
If they do take my phone (completely shut down, unlikely they'll be able to break in) and it's gone forever, that sucks, but then I get a new phone, restore from a backup, and move on with my life. Given that the probability of getting to this point is very low, I'm comfortable with the risk.
But sure, if I was at high risk of being detained at the border due to my profession, country of origin, ethnicity, etc., I'd probably look at this differently.
I really only hear these stories when people travel to the US, lol. It's especially sad+funny (darkly comic, say,) that the guy in OP is a US Citizen traveling back to the US.
You will lose them.
There are vendors that sell the technology to adversarially access phone data, the "Before First Unlock" is the safest state a phone can be, but it's not infallible. The safest option is to have a burner or factory-reset phone with nothing on it, even if the hack succeeds.
Any chance you want to do a public service and publish the latest compatibility matrix?
Just joking, obviously…
A compromise to this is that many phones have a "lockdown" mode, where it isn't fully off but refuses to accept biometrics until a code/pattern is used to bring it to a more day-to-day mode.
It's less-secure than being fully off, but it also means if you do need to access your phone you can do so more-quickly.
or have a good enough decoy or encryption system in place. Such as pressing a button to lock or replace key documents but keep the rest intact. So what looks like a sensitive document omits key information but still appears to be legit to observer.
Then log in with another temp account and use that for border pass etc, and then after border checks log back into your normal account?
A proper burner phone has basic usage on it. Link it to a Gmail account you don't use for anything else so you can have your ridesharing apps on it. Just enough for travel purposes, but nothing else.
If you really have to, have some social media accounts on it too and give them a basic amount of usage. Snap photos of the country you went on the trip to, etc.
The tactic/behavior is atrocious, but the vast majority of people’s phones contain absolutely nothing of interest to anyone. Mindless content and games and mundane text and emails. Even banking info, oh they bough some burritos and Cheerios and corn and gas and Cheetos
I might have had the same thought as you when I was in my early 20s, for reasons I won’t divulge.
In any case, the guy will walk with the good lawyers he’s undoubtedly able to obtain after this exposure.
The British (until recently a civilized people) will throw you in jail for refusing to unlock. Or for a tweet the powers that be don't like. Not to mention China, India, Russia...
A very strong immune response, like the one we see in this topic, is exactly what the Americans need to preserve their robust understanding of and de facto access to their rights. But let's not pretend they're doing a bad job. They're doing a great job, and they could be doing better.
- Tasker is an automation app for setting up rules for triggers and actions. It allows extension apps to be created to add new triggers and actions.
- someone at one point made an extension to add an action for wiping or factory resetting when triggered
- there was an existing extension (or core feature) to trigger when certain signals are lost or found (e.g., wifi signals, Bluetooth LE beacons, etc)
So the idea is to carry a BLE beacon (any "item tracking" one works) on your keychain, and an unassuming faraday cage pocket alongside it. If you want to wipe your phone, slip the fob into the pocket, the signal disappears, and your phone wipes. And if you don't have the keychain on you, just refuse to open it right away, as when they put the phone itself in a faraday cage (to prevent it from being remote wiped), they cause the signal to be lost, and it gets reset.
Not sure if all the pieces still exist (I dont think the tasker extension for wiping existed outside a forum post...)
Regarding the motivation for usbkill mentioned in the article: I too was motivated to think on this stuff in relation to my sense of injustice around Ross Ulbrecht, and wanting to think of some way that someone in his position could avoid getting caught. One creative variant in my thinking involved embedding the BLE beacon inside a rubber ball that could be launched and lost track of. Or maybe embedded in heel of a shoe and ditched in transit haha
Both approaches have situations they wouldn't work in. If you're extra paranoid you could do both.
Isn't that the same issue here that resulted in felony charges? Border agent was given a duress PIN and wiped the phone for the owner. Now owner is charged.
This requires no action whatsoever from the phone's owner, you could even be unconscious/dead and it would still work.
I think this sums it up for me:
- wipe-on-lost-signal = easier to claim as legitimate anti-theft mechanism. Harder to claim you forgot about it (because you'd have the actively live a life where they don't lose signal)
- wipe-on-found-signal = easier to claim as accident. ("I forgot that little faraday keychain was in my bag, and haven't touched it in years since I was on company project X"). Harder to claim it's a general anti-theft mechanism, as it requires a threat model of someone laying all your stuff out together on a table.
EDIT: Maybe it's in a little pouch attached to the phone itself, and they think it's a find-my-object tracker to inspect, but it's actually a beacon that wipes on detection. But yes, this is getting a little ridiculous in terms of plausible deniability :)
Perhaps less likely to go wrong than my original proposal when living normal life, as it might wipe if the BLE signal randomly gets lost.
It would be nicer if you could leave phone in cage during security, and remove beacon while loading airport trays ("remove all electronics from their cases..."). the only chance for a failure mode is only when you're going through security, and have the fob outside its case..
But you'd need to be able to leave your phone in the faraday cage pouch while going thru security, which is only ok if they don't notice... (maybe they commonly don't notice small faraday pouches aren't empty... Maybe they wouldn't if you had a secondary mobile device...)
Only once you're getting invasively searched would they (ideally) dump the pouch out into the tray with your phone.
They're also now well aware of the GrapheneOS duress PIN/password feature. It was designed to work against an attacker aware of it by acting as a deterrence. If they're aware of the feature, it discourages them from trying to coerce a PIN/password and attempt to unlock with it. We aren't fond of features depending on an attacker being unaware of them and this isn't one of those.
Pixels have a high quality secure element enforcing a maximum of 20 unique attempts to derive the encryption keys for each separately encrypted profile. There's also very aggressive rate limiting between the attempts. It filters out duplicate attempts by temporarily remembering the previous 5 unique attempts to make the rate limiting more usable. A misremembered PIN/password repeatedly entered over and over will only use up 1 attempt.
Android does have standard support for enabling wiping after N attempts and an open source app can be used to set a configurable limit rather than specifically after 10.
1. Was there a lawful entitlement to the papers? 2. Were the papers protected private property? 3. Were the papers released to the wind intentionally? 4. If intentionally released was it expected that they would disappear or simply fall to the ground?
A couple easy technological analogies: 3. "Sorry, I gave you the wrong code by mistake." 4. "I thought it would go to a private guest mode, not delete everything!"
Briefly: no.
Less briefly: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060716> (from the grapheneos HN account directly).
Even a duress PIN which triggers predefined deletion of certain folders, messages and apps could reduce law enforcement exposure significantly.
Wiping the overall data on the device via a factory reset, OS recovery mode or duress PIN/password prevents recovering any of the data because it reliably wipes material needed to derive key encryption keys and also reliably wipes the encrypted disk encryption keys. Wiping the encrypted disk encryption keys alone would not be good enough because they're stored on the SSD so imaging the SSD and restoring it could preserve the ability to recover the data. The way the key material needed to derive the key encryption keys is wiped prevents recovery via imaging the SSD mainly due to the secure element.
There's already support for reliably wiping data at the granularity of Private Spaces and secondary users. Those have their own encryption keys and can be reliably deleted due to having their own Weaver slots in the secure element and other hardware-based security integration.
Apps can also assorted generate encryption keys in the secure element and use those to encrypt data where it can be reliably deleted via wiping the hardware keystore keys. That requires apps built to have granular storage and encryption of their data.
Despite it being possible to wipe a secondary user or Private Space reliably, the past existence of it and when it was wiped will be easily discoverable via the main Owner user and system data. Preventing discovery of those profiles having existed requires an overall wipe of the data. It isn't feasible to hide it without doing that and hiding it would involve a whole bunch of unreliable removal of data without a way to prevent recovery along with redoing a bunch of statistics and other metadata to hide that there was another profile until recently. For example, things like the battery and data usage stats directly refer to the profiles. Even hiding it from naive analysis not looking at the leftover data on storage would still require changing a bunch of things to hide it.
Making data deletion of the data reliable for a whole profile or the whole data partition also requires a reboot or shutdown. Consider how much data gets loaded into the page cache and many other forms of data in the Linux kernel and other processes. Consider how much linger around in various kinds of registers, etc. including outside of the OS itself. Reboot or shutdown has code to get rid of this and the device sitting there turned off or booting again also gets rid of it.
They were clearly going to hook his phone up to forensics software on a laptop and had done what they needed to do in order to justify it for their own policies. It would not make sense to set up everything they did simply to have someone non-technical manually sift through his apps. They have widespread access to forensic software and also more advanced software with exploits. They definitely have easy access to it at a major Atlanta airport. The adversary in this case is not a non-technical human but rather advanced software from Cellebrite who are fully aware of alternative operating systems and document information on it. Their documentation directly refers to GrapheneOS and has tables listing their (currently very limited) capabilities against it.
This story got widespread news coverage and is widely known about. That should help make it clear how important it is for features to work against adversaries aware of these kinds of features. Our duress PIN/password works against adversaries aware of it. If they don't coerce a PIN/password from someone or don't enter a coerced PIN/password because they know it could be in use then the feature has worked. We want to improve the feature with secure element rate limiting integration in the future so that an OS exploit cannot be used to bypass it. The secure element already prevents an OS exploit from bypassing the limit of 20 total attempts for deriving encryption keys with massively increasing delays between those attempts. It used to solely be based on delays with throttling quickly reaching 1 attempt per day after 140 failed attempts but now there are only 20 total unique attempts. The past 5 failed unique attempts are temporarily remembered and discarded when entered again rather than trying to use them again for usability.
I mean - yes? If you design a subtle duress pin that only hides certain things, users would have to choose what.
I myself want the bank apps, password manager and email to disappear without a trace, but I don’t care about the social media, photos or web browser history. Other people, though, will have different priorities.
For the OS disk encryption, it uses separate randomly generated disk encryption keys for the main user, secondary users and Private Spaces which are different forms of profiles. Those keys are stored encrypted with key encryption keys derived from the per-profile lock method combined with various forms of key derivation material from elsewhere.
The most important of the key derivation material for profiles is the per-profile Weaver token on the secure element which it uses to enforce rate limiting for decryption attempts (max 20 attempts per profile with rapidly increasing delays) and to provide extremely reliable deletion of the data. Wiping the weaver slot for a profile prevents deriving the key encryption keys which prevents ever decrypting the randomly generated disk encryption keys again. The randomly generated disk encryption keys are only stored once and get wiped via a special SSD secure erase command but that isn't nearly as good as the secure element integration. If the SSD is imaged before a wipe and then restored, the data still isn't recoverable because the secure element wiped what's needed to decrypt the disk encryption keys.
Reliably deleting data is a much different thing from fully hiding that anything was deleted which is drastically more difficult and not compatible with how things are typically done. It's pretty much impossible to stealthily delete a secondary profile since there's too much system and Owner user data referencing them including the package manager's state, battery stats, data usage stats and far more. It's possible to attempt to go through all of that and hide it including forging the other stats to mask what was removed but data cannot be reliably deleted in a fine-grained way, especially on top of a modern copy-on-write or log structured filesystem combined with an SSD controller doing wear leveling.
An SSD controller will redirect writes to less written NAND than what is now being written to level out usage. That relies on it being aware of free storage to choose from that instead which is the purpose of TRIM. A modern SSD will also very proactively move around data rather than only redirecting writes to free space with less wear. It will identify the data that's rarely or never written and move it to the most written areas of the SSD to free up the space it was on for the most written data. Having 2TB of used space that's rarely ever touched, 1TB of a heavily written database and 1TB free will not only use the 2TB of active space for wear leveling with a modern SSD controller design. It will use the whole 4TB for it.
A modern copy-on-write or log structured filesystem doesn't write to the location where the data was originally but rather elsewhere. Android uses f2fs which is log structured which heavily helps with wear leveling at a higher level and also provides the ability to turn off data persistence temporarily and then roll back to the point it was turned back in an incredibly efficient way. Android uses that incredibly efficient rollback feature as part of A/B updates to preserve the ability to fully roll back an OS update which doesn't end up working properly until after it reaches the lockscreen successfully.
An app regularly appending data to a file, overwriting data in it or replacing the whole file is leaving data around all over the place. A decision can't simply be retroactively made to reliably delete the data for that file or the overall app. It would have had to be set up in a way that it can be reliably deleted. Without that, the whole secondary profile it's in is going to need to be deleted to reliably delete the data. If it's not in a secondary profile, the whole device needs to be wiped for it.
There may be more OS design decisions you have to make to cleanly wipe all references to particular app or process names but to me it all seems doable.
If it was like a HDD maybe that could work, but most modern solid state storage doesn't work like that any more.
You can't reliably overwrite any data, because the default is to write any new data in an empty sector (sort of, it has to do with how flash storage works, because of "wear leveling"), which is managed at the hardware level of the storage itself, so you also can't really tell the OS to do something else.
That's not what we were talking about. This is the full sentence we wrote:
"Reliable deletion of data requires setting it up to be reliably deleted later on by having it encrypted on storage with keys which can be reliably prevented from ever being obtained again."
What we're saying is that in order to have fine-grained deletion of data, it has to be encrypted with fine-grained keys with hardware support for deleting those keys reliably. Reliable deletion of data should also not be confused with stealthy deletion of data which is not generally possible for the kinds of data being discussed.
> I myself want the bank apps, password manager and email to disappear without a trace
You can put all of this into a Private Space or secondary user where it can be reliably deleted as a whole. There will be no way to recover any of the data if the profile is deleted. We have a planned feature for either a toggle to make the duress PIN/password only delete specific secondary profiles or more likely a 2nd duress PIN/password with that different purpose.
Deleting secondary profiles will reliably prevent recovering any of their data, at least after a reboot or shutdown. The best way to do it would be deleting them and then rebooting where the main user and secondary profiles not included in the deletion would still be there after the reboot. Without the reboot, it's unrealistic to reach the point where it's truly highly reliable. The OS does purge the keys for a secondary profile but a lot lingers around in system processes, page cache and elsewhere. If you delete a secondary profile with the goal of preventing data recovery then it's a good idea to reboot afterwards.
Dividing things up into secondary users is the way people can set up having fine-grained reliable deletion of the data. We can expand our duress PIN/password feature to support working with that.
It should be noted nothing about wiping secondary profiles is stealthy. It's very obvious there were profiles and that they were wiped. It can be determined when it happened and approximately how much data was deleted too. The data and filenames are unrecoverable but a fair bit of metadata on the sizes of files, etc. can be recoverable because that metadata is globally encrypted rather than per-profile encrypted. If you want to delete absolutely all traces of it in a reliable way, an overall wipe of the device does it extremely well. If you delete a profile then nothing encrypted by it can be recovered but what about all the evidence of it existing in the system and Owner user data? It's in the battery statistics, data usage statistics, package manager metadata and many other places. It can be purged from those but absence of data can be detected, and there's the usual problem of simply not being able to reliably delete data from computers in a fine-grained way. It's too late to reliably delete data from a file after the file has been regularly rewritten and modified.
Deletion needs to happen through deleting the keys used to encrypt all data which was ever stored in the file, so it would have had to be set up with that in advance. To reliably redact data in a file, the file would need a dedicated hardware-backed key with a new one being generated and the old one wiped as part of redacting data. Reliable wiping of a profile or the overall device works because it's all encrypted with filesystem-based full disk encryption using keys which can be reliably deleted. Profiles have fine-grained encryption for filenames and file data.
You cannot retroactively decide you want to reliably delete the data of a specific app and then do it. It's already spread all over the place. You'd need to wipe the whole profile or the whole device if it's not in a secondary profile. The OS would have had to set up a dedicated encryption key for that app's data with hardware support for deleting only that key by itself. Apps can do this and Signal is an example of app doing it which prevents backing it up via the OS backup system without also using their own backup system too.
Hell, I think a setup that doesn't wipe anything, but just drops you into a sanitized, isolated profile for the border agent to look at, would be fine for many users. Certainly you wouldn't want to use this in truly high-stakes situations where it's likely that your device will be confiscated no matter what, and analyzed to death, but for the simple "border agent wants to snoop on my data for a few seconds" case, it's likely sufficient.
(As always, risk analysis can be hard, humans are often bad at it, and not everyone's threat model is the same.)
Have a phone with crappy battery and have it trigger a high processor load to take the battery voltage drop and turn off the phone? (Eg what Apple tried to prevent with the batterygate thing).
So whatever a duress pin does, it has to be subtle enough that anyone looking doesn't link it to the act of entering the pin.
Reliably deleting data at the scale of the whole data partition, a secondary user or a Private Space is fully supported but requires a reboot or shutdown to truly complete it.
After wiping key derivation material needed to obtain the key encryption keys in multiple ways and wiping the encrypted disk encryption keys, the OS can still access the data. It still has data in the page cache, in registers and elsewhere. There are still a bunch of system processes with data tied to what was removed. The OS is still fully functional after the nearly instant wipe of everything needed to recover the data again. It can still access all data other than what's encrypted with hardware keystore keys and not currently decrypted.
The wiping process for the duress PIN/password is completed with a shutdown which tears down everything, zeroes memory and provides at least a small time window where the hardware is powered off too. A reboot would also work and the boot process has explicit zeroing of memory, registers, etc.
We decided to use shutdown for the duress PIN/pasword but a reboot is a valid approach too. Our locked device auto-reboot timer feature we first shipped in 2021 relies on the zeroing done by GrapheneOS for both the process of the OS tearing down and then again during booting to return the device to Before First Unlock state.
> also create a semi plausible artificial profile to hide the deletion event.
It isn't feasible to fool forensic software so it largely wouldn't work against state actors. It nearly certainly wouldn't have helped in this situation in the news. They aren't reliant on a non-technical person sifting through a phone. They'll just hook it up to a laptop and follow the data extraction procedure which involves enabling ADB. The software is aware of GrapheneOS can guide people through dealing with anything different about it. They've had a lot of trouble with extraction via ADB for GrapheneOS since the vulnerabilities they exploit via ADB keep getting patched or blocked it exploit protections but it isn't realistic to block extraction with them having the PIN/password. They could just enable the encrypted backup service in the OS instead and then use CLI tools to extract the data from there with the seed phrase. They don't do that because they want everything rather than only nearly all app data. They also have special code to deal with apps such as Signal with their own layer of data encryption since the data taken from their app data directory is nearly all useless by itself.
There's also quite a difference between wiping and rebooting into a not very plausible environment with decoy data set up by the user in advance compared to not properly wiping and giving access to a decoy profile. Bear in mind the OS can still access nearly all data after the wipe until a reboot. It could make a best effort attempt at purging as much as possible from memory, but the OS is not designed to continue functioning with all of the data disappearing. It can't just wipe all loaded encryption keys without crashing and rebooting anyway. It also has a ton of data still around in caches and elsewhere. We don't want to just do a best effort job cleaning up as much as we can but rather reliably prevent recovering any of the deleted data.
We could definitely add a duress PIN/password which wipes only specific secondary profiles, reboots and has the device still functional with whatever data was in the main user still there. That's a feature we can add, but it's important to note that it will not hide that there was deletion of data. It's easy to detect, and it's not feasible to hide that it happened. Many steps can be taken to make it less obvious, but it will still be easy for software aware of it to detect. Even a massive overhaul designed to perfect it would not address the SSD itself giving away what happened for more advanced analysis.
We aren't going to add a decoy profile compromising the security of the device and providing a way to recover data in a state where it isn't at all unrecoverable yet. We did already plan to consider a 2nd duress PIN/password which only wipes specific secondary profiles, but we need to make it clear that it cannot stealthily wipe them to users.
but that's not the point, the point is to not wind up in court by presenting a phone that no long contains evidence but seems plausibly like your phone so doesn't arouse suspicion
Evidence Tampering
I'm imagining a duress code that erases select files and any indication that there was ever a duress code set up in the first place.
Setting aside the now-regular attacks by the state on traditional 1st amendment rights (demonstrating, journalism, criticizing the government):
Authoritarianism's disregard for the 1st amendment doesn't stop just because one potential legal technical interpretation maybe says they should.
goal: not getting caught
their need: evidence of tampering
> Tunick provided this code to an agent, who entered it on the phone, after which “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart.”
A duress code might let me wipe my phone when someone holds a gun to my head and demands I unlock it. Problem is, there’s still someone holding a gun to my head.
The actual solution is cloud backup + re-image after the border.
Why would the bomb squad trust the box owner to help them defuse it? To understand the issue, you have to construct a proper analog.
But if it did, you'd still be on the hook for the bomb, even though technically the LEO set it off through incompetence.
Because the point of an analogy is not to provide an realistic or identical situation. On the contrary, the point of an analogy is to use a different situation in order to illustrate a very narrow similarity and make a point.
If the analogy illustrates and makes that point well, then it succeeds.
Why would the bomb squad be called after the box is unlocked and the contents revealed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice_in_the_...
Doesn't seem like it, no. It seems like the search had no legal basis, and so no legal search was hindered.
Their point was that if the law is knocking on your door to legally search your house, and you have records of your criminal empire printed out in boxes in your attic, or just non-illegal things you don't want people to see, and you burn those papers while the law waits out front, you're guilty of destroying evidence. The fact that this is all digital changes nothing.
The problem is with the legality of the search, not the charge of destroying evidence.
OTOH this was a warrantless search, I’d argue this is materially different. AFAICT, people can still refuse to provide a password to evidence that may incriminate them. I also think scope is much, much larger than searching a home or office. The kind of data people have in their phone is far more private than the kind of stuff people would keep in a filing cabinet and there is far more of it. And a phone is easier to search. I mean, that’s why they put this guy on a list and waited for him to travel somewhere instead getting a warrant.
Myself, I find this kind of searching of citizens to be pretty crazy and I can’t believe it’s allowed. My hope is this case brings this practice to an end.
Agreed, and my original point: the issue is the search, not the charge being related to digital or physical information.
"The duress PIN does not overwrite data. It wipes the encryption key, making the data inaccessible but leaving it technically present on the storage."
Or if it copied a snapshot some remote and inaccessible server while bricking the phone?
The digital nature of the evidence does make this different than physical files.
To the legal search example, suppose the police frequently stop by your house to discuss neighborhood gremlins. If they happened to accidentally see the boxes of evidence you'd be in trouble. You're allowed to destroy them though, and you might have a habit of destroying evidence for each of these gremlin chats. Doing so is legal.
Later, the police show up with a warrant (your example). If you think you're doing your normal gremlin evidence destroying and not blocking that warrant, destroying that evidence is still legal even with the police waiting on your porch to legally, forcibly search your house. The _intent_ behind your actions, at least in this case, is a core component of the crime.
Mind you, nobody will believe you, so you'll still have a hard time in court proving it (this is mildly in your favour because it's actually the prosecution's duty to prove your intent rather than your duty to prove lack of intent, but they're not exactly going to have a hard time convincing a jury that when you destroyed a bunch of evidence with police on your porch with a warrant it was because of that warrant), but it's still legal.
The question here is whether the police were in investigation mode. I believe it is an overreach to claim that everybody at a border was going through an investigation. And it is also a overreach that everyone who is selected for search at the border is under investigation.
An investigation doesn't need to have begun. All that's required is that you intended to destroy evidence in the event of an investigation.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519
> Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
"... or in contemplation of..."
https://www.subjecttoinquiry.com/2014/04/obstruction-of-cont...
-----
The defendant need not know a matter was pending or within federal jurisdiction. Instead, the “knowingly” element refers only to the obstructive conduct. United States v. Moyer, 674 F.3d 192, 208 (3rd Cir. 2012). The federal nature of the statute’s prohibition is a jurisdictional requirement, but not a substantive element under Section 1519. United States v. McRae, 702 F.3d 806, 834 (5th Cir. 2012).
No nexus requirement. Given that an investigation or matter within federal jurisdiction need not be initiated or even pending at the time of the obstructive conduct, the government need not prove any connection between the alleged obstructive conduct and the federal matter. Moyer, at 209; United States v. Gray, 692 F.3d 514, 519-20 (6th Cir. 2012).
Materiality is not an element. As an example, falsification through omission from a log or report can support a conviction, without proof of the materiality of the omission. Powell, at 356; Moyer, at 207-08.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so don't listen to me, but obstruction of justice is a thing, so I'm not sure how you can say that.
> The _intent_ behind your actions, at least in this case, is a core component of the crime.
Agreed, but irrelevant to the physical vs. digital question.
The exact way I did, with an additional clause afterward appropriately scoping the statement and thereby not stating something overly broad :) The point is that destroying evidence, by itself, is not a crime. Additional elements are required.
> irrelevant to some other question
That's true. I just saw something not quite true (your police on the porch example) and thought somebody might find the extra nuance interesting.
Interestingly, digital vs physical _does_ also matter a little in a few ways (e.g., whether it's even evidence in the first place if it's digital). However, as that's worked its way through the court system over the years, it is practically true that in most cases you're right, at least as it pertains to this charge AFAICT; digital evidence has similar properties to physical evidence in the eyes of the courts.
Absolutely not the case.
(edited to use a better reference)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519
> Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
"... or in contemplation of..."
https://www.subjecttoinquiry.com/2014/04/obstruction-of-cont...
And...
https://www.subjecttoinquiry.com/2014/04/obstruction-of-cont...
-----
The defendant need not know a matter was pending or within federal jurisdiction. Instead, the “knowingly” element refers only to the obstructive conduct. United States v. Moyer, 674 F.3d 192, 208 (3rd Cir. 2012). The federal nature of the statute’s prohibition is a jurisdictional requirement, but not a substantive element under Section 1519. United States v. McRae, 702 F.3d 806, 834 (5th Cir. 2012).
No nexus requirement. Given that an investigation or matter within federal jurisdiction need not be initiated or even pending at the time of the obstructive conduct, the government need not prove any connection between the alleged obstructive conduct and the federal matter. Moyer, at 209; United States v. Gray, 692 F.3d 514, 519-20 (6th Cir. 2012).
Materiality is not an element. As an example, falsification through omission from a log or report can support a conviction, without proof of the materiality of the omission. Powell, at 356; Moyer, at 207-08.
Marine laws are nuts.
In most other jurisdictions (i.e. civil law) it's perfectly legal for the accused to destroy evidence (assuming you're not committing any other crimes in doing so, like breaking and entering, property crime etc.), seizure being ordered or not, while it remains illegal to destroy evidence at the behest of someone else. I.e. civil law usually doesn't criminalize self-protective conduct. That's true even in e.g. Japan.
- Japan (South Korea has practically the same law word-for-word): https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3581/e... ("...relating to a criminal case of another person" i.e. this is not applicable if you do it in your own case). Likewise article 103, harboring is not illegal if you're related.
- Germany: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st... (this also includes harboring and makes it not illegal for family, which is a typical provision in civilized law)
- The usual suspects, Italy, Poland, Austria (of course), Switzerland, ... even the Russian criminal code has pretty much the same provisions
- Also the usual suspects: France ("guilletoine them all") and UK (common law) do not have this
Curiously, China quite closely matches the US.
This is essentially one aspect of Hobbesian self-preservation, I don't believe enwiki even mentions this idea anywhere. Another aspect of self-preservation is that -obviously- the mere act of escaping from prison or evading arrest can't be a criminal offense, and to varying degrees civil law jurisdictions recognize that.
What if we flipped this to instead be something that's explicitly not on the device?
The border search stuff only applies to information on the device. It cannot compel you to provide access to e.g. emails stored in a cloud provider.
If instead of making the process of stopping searches like this be a destructive one, we instead pre-purge the key but store it offsite with the ability to get it from an online location, then this feels like it's probably reasonable here. In the sense that the 4th amendment explicitly allows "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, ..."
There's probably some sort of technical problem I'm missing here (or maybe this functionality is available already).
Basically already exists depending on specific trade offs and risk profile.
You already can encrypt your data and store the encryption key offsite. But then you couldn’t use your phone during travel, if you toss the key locally.
You can encrypt the data at rest and leave the decryption key in RAM and just turn off your phone. But they can still take the phone and copy the encrypted data, if they think they’ll get the key later.
My understanding is that this individual would t want the government to access the encrypted data either.
But...
The issue at hand is the "locality" of the encryption header. He merely facilitated its deletion, not the data.
If he had a backup at home, is that still a felony?
What about if he had a backup on a flash drive with him?
What if he never had the header on the phone to begin with and used a detached header on a flash drive?
Are detached headers (a thing you can easily do with LUKS) now de-facto illegal?
This whole thing is making me feel rather uneasy about the bigger picture.
> The border search will include an examination of only the information that is resident upon the device and accessible through the device's operating system or through other software, tools, or applications. Officers may not intentionally use the device to access information that is solely stored remotely. To avoid retrieving or accessing information stored remotely and not otherwise present on the device, officers will either request that the traveler disable connectivity to any network ( e.g., by placing the device in airplane mode and disabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections) or where warranted by national security, law enforcement, officer safety, or other operational considerations, officers will themselves disable network connectivity. Officers should also take care to ensure, throughout the course of a border search, that they do not take actions that would make any changes to the contents of the device.
and
> Passcodes or other means of access obtained during a border inspection will only be utilized to facilitate the inspection of devices and information subject to border search. Passcodes or other means of access may not be utilized to access information that is only stored remotely. Passcodes or other means of access should only be recorded by the officer in a temporary format and should not be uploaded into CBP systems. Passcodes or other means of access recorded by the officer will be deleted or destroyed when no longer needed to facilitate the search of a given device.
The search is supposed to be lawful without a warrant because you're not really in the US yet per-se, hence if you're not there, how deleting the data can be a felony?
The premise that the law doesn't apply because you're not in the country is false. The constitution applies generally everywhere to all Americans, it's just that what's regarded as reasonable differs during a border search. IANAL, so just my lay opinion on this. Just to validate this, it's only because the constitution exists that the border authorities have any legal basis in doing inspections.
> On or about January 24, 2025, in the Northern District of Georgia...
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.35...
But in general, the thing to note here is that the 4th amendment is always applicable and in force. It's how it's interpreted that changes depending on the circumstance.
> While the Supreme Court has long recognized a border-search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, it applies to only two interests: promoting the duty regime and preventing contraband from entering the country; and ensuring that individuals are legally admitted. The government’s recent use of the exception goes substantially beyond these matters.
None of these two interests apply to his targeted search. No duty applies here. By definition, no contraband can exist on an erased phone
- if you're deemed to be on US soil, constitutional protections (4A) apply; can't be destroying "evidence" unless you're accused of a crime or found to have committed a crime
- if you're deemed _not_ yet on US soil, then how can you be charged with a crime under _US_ law?
Also, that constitutional protections are suspended within 100 miles of a land, sea, or air border.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22497
Although obviously not all US laws apply and enforcement is a whole other kettle of fish.
an officer can't stop me on the street and demand to see the contents of my phone -- unless they can show "probable cause" that I was about to commit a crime (based on other evidence), or I'm already named as a suspect or POI in an investigation. So if they ask to see the contents of my phone and I delete it instead (it's a very small bag in this example, Lol) am I obstructing an investigation?
If the investigation was legit, then yes. You should just say no. If you give the phone over to them or delete data on it after they ask to see it, you are destroying evidence. Does not matter whether you are the target of the investigation or not, they think you have evidence, you deleted it.
Just say no to the police and then keep your trap shut. This is especially true for federal agents.
> While the Supreme Court has long recognized a border-search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, it applies to only two interests: promoting the duty regime and preventing contraband from entering the country; and ensuring that individuals are legally admitted. The government’s recent use of the exception goes substantially beyond these matters.
None of these two interests apply to his targeted search. No duty applies here. By definition, no contraband can exist on an erased phone.
(The location was at the port of entry—the border—which is pretty much the definition of the CBP’s jurisdiction.)
I am curious if this is still obstruction - you still defeated their intent. If the law is just about intent, you can never defeat it.
Then it could last a lot longer. Technically they don't have the right to do that, but you won't have any physical mean to enforce your rights, and suing afterwards won't lead you anywhere in the current climate.
We'e had a few of these stories in HN before.
Yeah I think that's what people are missing. Intent is almost sufficient. Note that the officers efforts to examine your device would actually be frustrated by what you and others are proposing. So you are not just intending to obstruct but successfully doing so.
Now I'm worried that this will be held against me..
The border agent has a lot of control over your life at that point and virtually zero accountability.
> After questioning, he eventually turned it over but gave officers a passcode that then erased the contents of his Google Pixel phone.
I don't see the problem being a clean device, but destroying evidence in the moment.
What does the security officer at your company say?
Either you shouldn't be leaving with devices with the data from your job on them, or you don't trust them, but your job is fine with it.
I keep work things separate. If it's a personal trip, I don't travel with work devices. If it's a work trip, and there's worry, I usually take a loaner device usually with ms office and a vpn.
Usually the issue is not returning, but other governments.
From the register (2023)
https://www.theregister.com/security/2023/06/01/us-court-fin...
Could be another one of those fun exercises in legal hacking to build tyranny that people in the US seem to be so fond of.
Obviously have the duress pin if what’s in your phone is worse than the obstruction charges too.
So in the article situation, the guy is a protestor and presumably suspects he’s going to be targeted by the police for it. He’d keep that stuff isolated from his usual activity. There’d be no need to generate convincing fake activity.
Certainly more of a hassle than having a PIN that can destroy everything.
Burner phone / clean phone for border crossings seems the more accessible option.
As others have noted, this is standard policy amongst many organisations, some on account of US policies and practices, some on account of other states.
> Obviously have the duress pin if what’s in your phone is worse than the obstruction charges too.
I would say that if what you have on your phone is worse than a destruction of evidence conviction then you may want to just wipe the phone before you get anywhere near a cop. Playing stupid games with cops most often leads to winning stupid prizes. Keep the interaction simple. "No."
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/researcher-detained-at-u-s...
While so many people try to come up with technical solutions for legal concerns, the method Jacob used was pragmatic.
You cannot be compelled to turn over what you do not have
If you're concerned about your digital devices while crossing borders, do not forget a viable option is to simply not have a digital device with you when you cross.
Put simply, do not limit your imagination to purely technical means.
Of course, there may be means to compel you to retrieve that data, but typically at border crossings your primary threat surface is physical possession.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Amendment 5:
"..nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search
>Amendment 5:
Destroying evidence isn't testimony. Moreover he would have been in the clear if he just kept his mouth shut.
But no respectable judge would ever have issued a search warrant on the basis of "we want to rifle through his messages/contacts so we can hopefully accuse him of something".
Protesters against this exact same thing were mis-prosecuted under "domestic terrorism" and "racketeering" charges before (got dismissed in 2025).
They can say anything they want. They hold all the power. This will never change until enough people take matters into their own hands, as the system has been compromised.
we should always be asking: is this the only way you can prove the accusation? just because it would make LEO life easier - that's not justification for violating the constitution.
an consider what this case teaches us: clean up your devices before you cross a border. how does that even help the goal of law enforcement?
In theory. In practice, this is a hopelessly outdated supposition.
This is 100% untrue. You can be guilty of destroying evidence that includes no criminal activity whatsoever.
Evidence with regard to which investigation?
They can take it for a "reasonable amount of time" (inconvenience you for a few hours and make you miss your connecting flight) while they copy an encrypted image. They then must return it to you.
"to conduct such an intrusive and nonroutine search under the border search exception (that is, without a warrant), the Government must have individualized suspicion of an offense that bears some nexus to the border search exception’s purposes of protecting national security, collecting duties, blocking the entry of unwanted persons, or disrupting efforts to export or import contraband. See also United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 620 (1977) (“The border-search exception is grounded in the recognized right of the sovereign to control, subject to substantive limitations imposed by the Constitution, who and what may enter the country.”). If a nonroutine search becomes too “attenuated” from these historic rationales, it “no longer [will] fall under” the exception"
-- US v. RAYMOND IDEMUDIA AIGBEKAEN (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca4/17...)
Of course whether border agents know or care about this is a different story and by the time you are quoting precedent, you're probably beyond any of this being helpful.
Although then you get a possible delay of undefined duration, additional questioning and seizure of your device.
I'm interested to know about specific examples. Aside from extraordinary cases where the gov't is pretty sure they're dealing with a bona fide terrorist, my expectation is that CBP mostly isn't really that interested in detaining people indefinitely just for the lulz. They're probably just going to say "okay, fine, we're taking the phone, here's your receipt for it, get lost" and let you go on your way.
To put it in protective, just opening a web browser or some other app can delete/alter more data than was deleted in this case.
I don’t think a judge would care about splitting that hair.
This is important because this is a feature of some crypto systems like LUKS. You can have your header on another physically septate device. If this is ruled on in an insufficiently nuanced way it could have very significant implications for carrying encrypted data without the key.
Image he took a blow-torch to a safe and the door welded shut. The contents are still there but the door is broken.
This analogue isn't perfect, but it isn't relevant anyway: the laws in question criminalize acts based on their intent.
The blowtorch wasn't intended to destroy the contents of the safe (a la deletion of a key), but even still: if the intent was to impede or delay the investigation by welding the safe shut, it would be equally criminal.
>"He" (by which I mean, technically the agents)
Under the same logic you could mail a bomb to anyone and say you didn't kill anyone, they did. It was just rigged to blow when they opened the box.
When the administrative enforcement bureaucracies want to harass you they'll hit you with some ruinously expensive civil fine BS. No court will give a crap about you until you've exhausted a bunch of appeals, which you of course appeal to the same agency that's trying to screw you. Only after years of that (and invariably legal fees, because you can't go it alone), do you sue them and get to see a real courtroom. But even then, this is a civil matter, not a criminal one, so all your rights have been nerf'd and there's a hundred years of precedent and case law that tilt things in their favor. If you get lucky, they'll settle and you'll only be out a few tens of thousands for the ordeal.
https://yalelawjournal.org/forum/customs-immigration-and-rig...
And it's impossible to ignore that context. This is plainly wrong. And people trying to justify this plainly fascist search is sickening.
The only reasons allowed for border searches are ensuring that individuals are legally admitted (inapplicable here because citizens are always legally entitled to enter) and preventing contraband from entering.
A wiped phone can't contain contraband, so wiping the phone serves the same purpose as a search. It's not destroying evidence anymore than throwing away a water bottle before going through TSA is destroying evidence.
While this is the most compelling argument I've seen surrounding this case and this specific context, the initial attempt to enter with the contraband is likely a crime on its own - partial entry has already happened, the acts in question happened on US soil.
Imagine applying the same concept to drugs (and "body is a container" was found unconstitutional long ago, so no need to opine there) - if you're subject to a search and you eat drugs, does that somehow absolve you of the original attempt to smuggle?
There is no requirement that evidence is "contraband".
As other comments have said, the courts aren't autistic. They don't fall for filly semantic games.
but to say that the laws and precedence aren't largely concerned with building some semantic context, and that lawyers don't build chains of reasoning in that framework to prophet their positions is absolute nonsense.
you're positing a world where a judge just rules entirely on feels, and I think most judges would be quite offended by that notion.
Claiming that destroying evidence of a crime proves no crime was committed is the logic of a 1 year old who thinks the world disappears when they close their eyes.
A lawyer can go into court and argue semantics around the edges but isn’t going to get very far using semantics to argue destroying evidence also erases a crime.
A wiped phone cannot contain contraband data, so the border search exemption cannot apply.
Even lawyers with extremely different ideologies will give you convergent answers in a lot of cases, even when those answers conflict with an apparently obvious reading of the original text. Explaining that would require drilling down into details of thousands of court cases -- like reading a complex proof of a seemingly simple theorem.
I don't like that any more than you do. It's not mathematics, and even when given all the details, I usually find their inferences laughably bad -- even when I agree with the conclusion. It's not "logic" as I apply it as a logician, philosopher, or software developer. Lawyers (people on my side ideologically) will insist on the soundness of reasoning for decisions that they don't like but accept as valid.
So I don't find quoting the Constitution to be of any utility. None of those words what you think they mean. And fixing that requires basically throwing out the entire system of American jurisprudence. Which would be fine with me, to be honest.
And that alone is already a pretty scandalous problem. If the law is not stated in a way that ordinary people can understand, how the hell are they supposed to obey it? Those who cannot afford the highly paid law explainers are basically locked out of society.
The truth is that the constitution is interpreted by humans in a common law context, and enforced by the apparatus of state, which has the means to impose its will. Calling this doublespeak is weird.
The term doublespeak derives from two concepts in 1984 ("doublethink" and "Newspeak") despite the term itself not being used in the novel. [edited]
I just bought a cheap 1984 to masochistically read again.
The Constitution is written in plain English. And for the most part, Supreme Court decisions are written in plain English that any reasonably literate US citizen can understand. Yes, the law has technicalities and terms of art just like any other profession.
But one of the most damaging mentalities in modern times is the idea that the common man is incapable of understanding the law at even a basic level. This is flat-out not the case. Which leads to the follow-on problem: people who think lawyers have the ability to cast magic mumbo-jumbo spells that "get their clients off on a technicality" somehow. The best quote I ever heard about that from an attorney was "any time someone says a person 'got off on a technicality,' you can pretty much just safely replace that in your head with 'had their constitutional rights egregiously violated.'"
Yes, there are problems. Qualified immunity is a problem. Prosecutorial misconduct can be a problem. Abuse of discretion at the border is a problem. But that's different from doomerism about the entire justice system to the degree Very Online people express it.
And practical implementation of it all, the rights that you can actual force to have are the third thing.
I suspect the 5th amendment is probably more valuable to the defense here as the password is effectively testimonial and the give us your password or we'll ... is compelled speech.
Either way, it's gonna be many 10s of thousands of dollars in lawyers fees to fight this. Which sucks.
I'm curious, is there any case law from the pre digital age regarding people forced to open their briefcase and let the border guard read all their documents at a port of entry?
Are we still discussing a border crossing case that is long historic or there is still an active drama for this guy going on?
What if, by some bad luck, that lawyer moved on to other job ventures, sold his office along with the equipment needed to unlock the phone? Will that still counts as a felony? The equipment maybe still in circulation and the data is still on the phone.
See ya when the political climate changes... maybe.
When I used to work in cell phones and I was debugging them, when they crash I would analyze the OS core dump for things like repeated phone numbers or emails etc. Basically any thing that signifies a memory leak. But that core dump would be the entire phone’s RAM and storage.
Border guards have always been of questionable value: they inspect your TN-1 and made somewhat arbitrary decisions on your documentation. You’d go one week and they’d send you to secondary but another they’d glance at the docs and just wave you through.
So, in both cases the government wouldn't have access to the contents of the phone
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...
> Courts have generally found that compelling individuals to provide their numeric or alphanumeric passcode is potentially testimonial under the Fifth Amendment, as it forces the defendant to reveal “the contents of his own mind.” In Re Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum 670 F.3d at 1345; see also U.S. v. Apple MacPro Computer, 851 F.3d 238 (3d Cir. 2017). It is analogous to compelling production of the combination to a wall safe, which is testimonial, as opposed to surrendering the key to a strongbox, which is not. See Doe v. U.S., 487 U.S. 201, 220 (1988). However, even if a court finds that providing the passcode is “testimonial,” it may still fall under the “foregone conclusion” exception
https://www.nacdl.org/Content/Compelled-Decryption-Primer
In short, you can't be compelled to give up the code in a dragnet attempt to find evidence against you (e.g. a boarder guard can't riffle through your text messages to see if you might have done something illegal), but if it's already certain that particular evidence exists on the device as a result of other evidence, they may be able to compel you to give up your passcode.
Note though that the cases where this has come up are very few and far between, and there isn't a super clear overriding precedent to follow.
In general though, the best choice here is to say nothing at all and work with a lawyer to figure out how to proceed.
And I'm not fixing the typo.
America didn't have an abrupt revolution like in China or Russia, just the collective populace willingly being complacent bitches for the last 26 years
What is happening in China is bona fide slavery and it’s telling that your response comes back almost like clockwork whenever it’s brought up on this or any website.
I think it would be easier to understand the playing field and choose your actions accordingly, if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era -- except of course with 1000x more invasive and effective surveillance tech.
The social dynamics are the same - the abuses, the selective enforcement, the lack of recourse, the same characters in the roles of various levels of "law enforcement" and "politics". I'm so very sorry, but the best you can do from here is speedrun the collapse.
It's a temporary situation, it isn't necessarily a permanent situation.
Tell me how you think East Germany is doing these days.
And no, it doesn't have to take 40 years to right the ship, so long as people get their heads out of their asses and vote. Things are likely to change by the end of this year, and in another 2 years we could have a very different government that could undo a lot of the bullshit going on right now.
The US wanted this.
That's half the people who showed up to vote, not "half the voting population". 1/3 of the eligible voters simply didn't vote, and from the people I've encountered that don't vote, they are mostly left-leaning.
No, stupidity and self-harm aren't going away, those are human traits. The current admin is actively hurting everyone, with tariffs and stupid wars he campaigned that he wouldn't start, ICE in every city everywhere causing chaos even to right-wing supporter-owned businesses (they wanted immigration reform but not like that!). This admin has shit the bed, and even his supporters are feeling that. They are now in the "finding out" phase, and the next phase doesn't look so good for republicans in the next election because of it.
It's still worrying! His supporters still number lots of people who a) are still somehow too gullible to realize Trump and the MAGA crowd are not going to make their lives better, and b) actively want what's going on. But there are easily more eligible voters in the US who wouldn't vote for a Republican with a gun to their head, or who are finally starting to understand that "sticking it to the libs" is hurting themselves.
It's not going away, but it's likely that it's declining, and possible it will continue to do so. Whether or not it declines quickly enough, before these jackasses consolidate power and break what's left of our institutions... well, that remains to be seen.
But the dems are almost certainly getting ready for their own come to jesus moment, their base is pretty pissed off too. Could get interesting. A boring candidate will probably be the preferred choice after the chaos of these years, but after that I think it might get wild.
It reminds me somewhat of the state of the Weimar Republic. The democratic parties failed which gave an opening to the nazis.
They do believe in stuff. And their soft supporters succesfully manage to turm the blame to others.
Trump situation is result of years of hard work of heritage foundation, conservative preachers, tech bros, supreme court and so on. He represents their project being succesfull.
I don't even think Trump was the Republicans' best shot, only popular enough to beat Clinton and Harris (and lose to Biden), and probably tanking his party now.
And always were.
The US is not the first country to fall into this trap. The exact same happened in Germany. The non-Nazi party offered nothing to anyone besides not being Nazi.
The reasons for Trump vote were conservatives enflamed panic about trans and wish to harm them. It was hate of non-white immigrants.
And above all, it was vote for male supremacy. It was based on lies and wish to enact harm and cruelty. Openly so.
If you want to win next time, you need to stop closing eyes from that. Stop idealizing and projecting motivations on republican voters. Stop whitewashing them and listen to what they are saying and when.
Where's the Project 2028 book?
Is there anyone credible putting together the Executive Orders to undo the stack of shit, is anyone putting together a short list of District Attorneys to interview on January 21, etc?
> And no, it doesn't have to take 40 years to right the ship, so long as people get their heads out of their asses and vote.
so then you admit the outcome here is contingent/conditional. do you understand that means we are already in dire circumstances if the outcome isn't certain?
In terms of the ending, East Germany was nearly an ideal case. The state just sort of gently fell over. The country got absorbed into a friendly neighbor. There wasn't much loss of life, no widespread destruction.
Then there's East Germany's predecessor state, which ended because it decided to wage war on half the world, and its people bore the consequences. Millions dead, cities wrecked, occupation by foreign armies, the country carved up. "This too shall pass" isn't always a good thing.
Or look at the state that created and sustained East Germany. Borne out of violent revolution, decades of repression, collapse, turmoil, economic hardship, brief flirtation with democracy, de facto dictatorship, no end in sight.
My biggest worry with the US right now isn't the government itself. It's that so many people want this government. Voting doesn't help when the voters want the bad stuff. We could have a very different government in another two years if the people want it. I'm not convinced they do. If they do I'm not convinced that sentiment will last. We already went through this once, and the "actually, let's not give the shitheads power" sentiment fell apart by the next election.
> I think it would be easier to understand the playing field and choose your actions accordingly, if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era -- except of course with 1000x more invasive and effective surveillance tech.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.. might just be a duck.
I don’t believe those living “normal lives” in East Germany or the Soviet era considered the police to be evil and invasive the way we do today.
Soviet famine of 1930–1933
"It is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union. In addition, 50 to 70 million Soviet citizens starved during the famine but ultimately survived."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
Great Purge
"Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million."
We don't look at the deaths of our own people as "oppressive" despite the fact that the circumstances that caused them to die was our system.
I'm not some bleeding heart liberal or anti-capitalist... I just have an open mind to the idea that we're not necessarily the good guys just because we are us and I look at what is factually true - as in, how could we be described by a non-sympathetic entity.
Everyone is their own hero. Nobody believes sincerely that they're the baddie.
Chronic lower respiratory diseases account for 145k people a year in the US, and that is a consequence (largely) of car dependence...
Or, more directly, 20,000 people a year die due to malnutrition and starvation, tallied over years (as most do) that can rapidly rise to over 100k in a half-decade.
The UK has an excess mortality rate of 330,000 linked to healthcare cuts (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/over-330000...).
I get that the numbers were talking about are much higher, but it doesn't follow logically to me that ordinary citizens knew that their government was the "bad" one with its actions.
Hell, I know Russian families who genuinely believe Putin is doing the right thing right now. So, I don't blindly accept that my government is right just because I think "we're the goodies".
I know Russians who want to have nothing to do with Putin and want to live their life.
I have worked with both Russians and Ukrainians who fled Russia and Ukraine to escape mobilization (Personal note: it was interesting to see how good cooperation they had).
Famine was so common you need extreme outliers like 1601–1603 which killed ~1/3 of the population before they tend to show up in history books.
The regions of the USSR (the Volga region, the Central Black Earth Region, the North Caucasus, the Urals, the Crimea, part of Western Siberia), Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus have suffered from the result of the famine caused by forced collectivization. About 7 million people were killed by hunger and illnesses associated with malnutrition in 1932–1933.
This tragedy does not have and cannot have internationally established signs of genocide and should not be the subject of contemporary political speculation.
Deputies of the State Duma, honoring the victims of the 1930s famine on the territory of the USSR, strongly condemn the regime that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals, and proclaim the inadmissibility of the revival in the formerly included in the Soviet Union, totalitarian regimes that neglected the rights and lives of their citizens.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230329195700/https://holodomor...
"The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933 that resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people, are the subject of scholarly and political debate, particularly surrounding the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which was designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention."
"normal life" under the Stasi was constant political terror and suppression.
The death counts are low because they thought death too little of a penalty for opposing them - they used psychological warfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung) and torture instead.
The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims states that there were between 300,000 and 500,000 victims of the Stasi's use of psychological warfare, direct physical torture and gross human rights violations: https://web.archive.org/web/20210909114942/https://irct.org/....
Sure, not as bad. Woohoo.
Planning, attempting to, or helping people escape (not stay) was the #1 reason for Stasi arrests.
Specifically, the most frequent Stasi arrest charges were Republikflucht ("fleeing the republic") and Fluchthelfer ("helping others flee")
Also, the Stasi ran on roughly 1 informant per 60–180 residents. Your network of friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors would have several. They officially criminalized private speech, correspondence and travel. The US surveillance system is bad, but the Stasi informant network and set of official consequences was at such a level as to cause constant fear and dread for everyone.
- as a citizen, being arrested for trying to leave
- as an illegal alien, being arrested for trying to stay
Those are literally structural opposites of each other.
Iceland and the UK in particular. They wouldn't even let me in at London Heathrow without a printed out return ticket (I had to run over to the British Airways desk to get a copy).
Either way - I was not allowed to stay longer than a few weeks.
That's not a wrong thing, it's very normal. If you want to stay, you have to apply for residency.
By 1) relying on such labour and 2) denying either lawful entry or any plausible path to permanent status for the vast majority of these workers and their families, not to mention many, many, many broken promises along the way (asylum, DREAM Act, don't get me started on Native American treaties), the U.S. has de facto maintained a legally-underprivileged and disadvantaged working class long after the statutory prohibition of (most) slavery and indentured servitude.
Yes, there are also economic and political circumstances within the US geopolitical orbit which encourage inward migration. That too cannot be separated from long-standing U.S. foreign, economic, and military policies within the region.
This needs to stop.
There are very few if any country that does not enforce immigration rules. Let any American try to live illegally in Canada. Sure, they can live under the radar like you can in Mexico too, but if they catch up to you, goodbye. Mexico doesn’t even treat its own returning citizens well. If you have not been a taxpayer you have to assume many things tax paying Mexicans get for free like education and healthcare. People act like we’re an aberration for enforcing immigration laws. We’re not. Go check out South Africa and see how they treat illegals.
The one place where any hard working person was welcome.
What is the protectionism even for? The US doesn't have a great social system that can be exploited.
Those"illegals"? They were making sandwiches and cleaning toilets, and this is their reward.
Yes we can have legal immigrants that fill skills gaps. Thats not an issue for 95% of Americans so long as it’s done justly (and not simply a way to pay workers less).
Immigration has an official legal process to follow.
Why is that so bad? If the law needs to change - fine, change it. But allowing people to break the law is to enable collapse of the rule of law.
Forgive my comparison, but it illustrates the problem.
The law cannot be allowed to become lawless itself, depriving the people of their rights to fast track the pre-determined punishment.
None of those are needed for enforcing immigration law. This is a choice, supported by a lot of people who should have known better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany_balloon_escape
If we don’t try to delete the data off our phones then the anti-freedom brigade has already won.
It's already a crime (in the books) to drive out of several red states for women's health care reasons, and they'll follow you on flock if they can.
Mark Bray had his and his family's airline tickets to Spain out of Newark "mysteriously cancelled" while in line after checking in their baggage.
It's as if they are looking for an exacting duplicate of previous regimes before they become concerned—the agency name must be "Stasi" and uniforms must be of the same color.
By the end of the 1940s, things are tightening up, there are now armed "police" who in effect work for the Soviets "protecting" East Germany at the border, barbed wire and deep trenches now block unofficial crossings, but it is still definitely possible to leave, in the worst case maybe you bribe a guard. Hundreds of thousands are able to flee by "just" walking (or driving) West.
In 1952 the "Special Regime" begins to "keep out spies". Most of the border is sealed, you can't bribe your way when there is no official crossing, the remaining guards are told to shoot people who try to cross, after all none of them are legitimate. However since Berlin still has a crossing, and the West still seems hell bent on holding their half despite the fact it's cut off from the world, you could travel to East Berlin and sneak across to West Berlin. Over the next decade or so millions do, East Germany tried very hard to stop this, but because it was physically possible it seemed like there wasn't much they could do...
In 1961 they built the wall. It was no longer physically possible to escape.
That's wrong.
I am sure you do not speak German, because otherwise you'd have a lot more information available.
If you do speak German, listen to Dieter Hallervorden. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJh9ejnpvFc
He explained why he escaped from the DDR. And they ALL knew that the cops were sniffing on them. Of course they considered the cops as evil and invasive, even by today standards.
He was not a “normal person”, normal people are like your neighbour who lives simply and doesn’t engage in politics except to share their discomfort about some relatively trivial grievance like the price of eggs.
And yes, there are also consequences today .. but on a whole different level. So the US might head into a Stasi regime (or rather Gestapo) .. but they ain't there, not even close.
Oh, about that. There would have been no Tor service in the GDR.
What we hear about is far from comprehensive, and many of the atrocities won’t be unveiled or investigated until the next decade.
The Epstein cover up shows they’re used to keeping secrets.
I’m not sure why we’re pretending there’s not a convicted felon in charge of the entire system.
the stasi were spying on people and putting them in jail. what exactly is your claim about the difference? is it a difference in distinction or a difference in degree?
it's as long as you're not doing anything wrong you don't have to worry about it Then once changed the definition of what wrong means.
If you're not a criminal you don't have to worry about it That's for your safety Then they changed the definition of what a crime is
I'm not buying it. Turn off the news and go out into society, preferably one of those small so-called racist communities. You'll find out the truth, one way or the other.
Others came to work the railroads because they were willing to trade racist abuse for economic benefits.
Are you really that unfamiliar with American history?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
What-aboutism is not a very compelling argument.
As it is, no one was discussing Europe, let alone holding it up as a model society.
Fascism marches on in full swing.
At what point? It's easy to say when we mention the Stasi or the Nazis that we're comparing it to the end game they had going, but the transformation was a bit of process.
I also do find americans to be utterly naive regarding this slide towards fascism, and I live here so don't bother trying to explain it to me.
You only saw the end result regarding the "universe as what the Stasi was doing", obviously you didn't pay attention to the road getting there.
I am not saying that these conspiracies are true, but this is how fascism looks like. Putin doesn't arrest all of his political challengers, but he gets rid of the ones that are viable opponents. In case of Kirk, he is popular enough to make it big in politics and in the short term he could break the party narrative.
Don't kid yourself. That's what they want. They're slowly testing to find out how much they can get away with. Would you have imagined that the nation would quietly sit back and allow what's been done so far ten or twenty years ago? Just because there have been large protests doesn't mean anything. Congress should have been outraged on both sides at this madness, but one side only cares about winning (so they like it) and the other is completely feckless.
The US steals more data and conducts more illicit monitoring of people in a day than the Stasi ever could in a year. Its just that the Stasi lived in an analog world, so you had lots of PHYSICAL material leftover for people to point at in faux horror.
Even now, the US is busily deploying electric shock gloves whose main selling point, DIRECT FROM THE MOUTHS OF LAW ENFORCEMENT, is that they allow pain to be administered to enforce "compliance", without leaving any real evidence.
And they are being trialed in Nebraska. On ... SCHOOL CHILDREN.
(and to complete the dystopian joke, check out the name of the company selling these Dr Doom gloves)
Whats that you hear? Howls of outrage & dissaproval from the denizens of "The Land of the Free" (tm)?
Err, no. Its just the wind blowing leaves around.
You sir are the proverbial frog who has been in the pan so long, he doesn't realise he's being boiled alive
-Mark Twain
I challenge you on falsifiability. What evidence would it take for you admit the US is Stasi level?
This is a pretty silly take. If you actually follow the news, all of these issues are getting pushback. It's not at all clear that even a competent fascist-leaning government would be able to push through what the current one is trying to do, and sadly for them, competence in their ranks is in short supply.
The bigger issue has nothing to do with the faddish concerns of the current government. The era we should be looking to is not East Germany/late Soviet - it's more like the Gilded Age. Robber barons need to be dealt with from time to time.
I'm pretty optimistic that after the next general America will be ready to give up on the extremity of late turn over a new leaf. I fully expect a new president to be ushered in, whether R or D, and for some level of normalcy to start creeping back.
The Soviets lost eventually, I don't think America can lose. Canadians like myself have watched America win for our country's entire existence; I am unconvinced that a decade of silliness is enough to compare America to East Germany.
In 2016 I remember Americans saying this was the end of the line and the country was doomed. 10y later they're richer than ever and its companies have global dominance of the most world-changing technology of the last 20y. I just don't think "the collapse" is coming anytime soon.
If anyone's interested in a friendly wager, my email is open. I'll happily go 1:1 odds that America will have a new president come 2029 and the country will still remain the world's richest and most powerful.
[1] I'm not defending the behavior of border control here, but I also don't think we need to overreact to this one example which is exactly what is happening.
Yeah, that's awful. As far as federal overreach of power goes, that's pretty inexcusable. I'd probably posit that COINTELPRO in the 60s was more insidious, but that doesn't discount this story individually being terrible.
I still maintain that America is not in the midst of its own demise and a comparison to East Germany is inaccurate.
Selectively detaining this guy, likely overreach.
Trying to get his phone's unlock code to go on a fishing expedition for whatever they can find, absolutely overreach.
But this guy catching felony charges for giving federal border police a duress PIN to wipe his phone when they asked for an unlock PIN? Not actually overreach.
You have the right to remain silent, not to lie to the police when detained (18 USC § 1001, and many state-level laws to the same effect also exist). Our justice system could not function if people had a right to lie to the police. Once you are detained, whether or not that detention is eventually determined to be lawful, destroying or disposing of your possessions to prevent police from accessing them is also generally a crime.
You fight abuses later, in court. Or, if you're going to use a duress PIN in the moment, you accept the legal consequences.
And yes, giving a duress PIN to wipe a phone when asked for an unlock PIN is a lie which may result in destruction of evidence. And no, the law does not care about "I'm not touching you"-level rationalizations of whether something is a lie or whether it was technically the police who entered the code to wipe the phone. Proximate cause is a longstanding legal concept.
I think it's an interesting case that will get litigated in the courts. It seems they'll have to prove that the phone contained "evidence"; it could have just had embarrassing personal photos that he didn't want shared. When a house is raided and someone flushes a toilet, can courts assume they flushed drugs, or does that have to be proven?
I hope he's found not guilty, but either way this definitely is not the "sky is falling", "we're almost a police state" case that folks here are making it out to be. It's a very narrow and novel line.
Game it out at the systems level. If the prosecution had to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that what was destroyed would have been evidence, then destruction of evidence would be functionally permissible whenever done competently.
> ...either way this definitely is not the "sky is falling", "we're almost a police state" case that folks here are making it out to be. It's a very narrow and novel line.
Agreed. And activists should generally work with lawyers in order to be familiar with areas of the law they are likely to encounter in the course of their activism. Especially activists who travel internationally.
Well yes, but ... is that not the case? Game out the opposite. If the prosection doesn't have to demonstrate that something was valid evidence beyond a shadow of doubt that's rife for all sorts of abuse.
In general I don't believe I can catch a (legitimate) felony for locking myself in the bathroom and flushing the toilet during a police raid.
Most juristictions have a duty to preserve or not to spoil evidence once you are clearly detained or a search is clearly imminent (i.e. the police are knocking on your door), or when litigation can be reasonably anticipated. Behavior like locking the door and then burning/shredding papers, wiping a phone, or even flushing a toilet can absolutely be considered destruction-of/tampering-with evidence past that point, even (and especially) if the evidence is impossible to recover.
Assuming that is the preceding paragraph you reference, then there is nothing to respond to because the law is clear. As zugi mentions, obstruction of a federal investigation by tampering with evidence (i.e. potentially anything in the scope of a particular search of which you are aware) in just about any sort of way is illegal under 18 USC § 1519 (and again, most states have similar laws with regard to state officials/departments and searches).
This subthread, the general thread, the linked article, and the original event it covers are all within the context of someone aware they are detained or under investigation. In that context, the prosecution doesn't need to demonstrate that what was destroyed is evidence. Just that the suspect obstructed the search by destroying, altering, or tampering with something in the search's lawful scope.
This state of affairs isn't any more or less rife for abuse than the general process for obtaining a warrant or the standards for an officer assessing probably cause.
So as much as I sympathize with the guy a d wabt to cheer him on, he's probably screwed.
If yes, then those confessions or statements could become inadmissable (i.e. the suspect was effectively compelled to testify against himself, in violation of the 5th Amendment). When police combine deception with coercion or threats, the answer to that question leans toward yes, but it will depend on the juristiction and the judge and is often assessed on a case-by-case basis. Police in any given juristiction probably have a reasonably good sense (from their own accumulated experience and local training) of what kind of deception results in the produced evidence becoming inadmissable in the courts where the defendant will appear.
I was distressed and got confused and gave the wrong PIN. Anyway there was no evidence on the phone just a few embarrassing photos.
Also I just so happened to catch a bad case of indigestion right as the police knocked down my door. There were absolutely no drugs in the toilet when I flushed it.
To me the far more concerning fact is that this is getting any pushback at all. The response described is what everyone ought to do without exception when asked for their PIN by law enforcement. The right not to be forced to provide access to your own devices needs to be staunchly defended. These devices serve as extensions of ourselves at this point.
> Also I just so happened to catch a bad case of indigestion right as the police knocked down my door. There were absolutely no drugs in the toilet when I flushed it.
To repeat, for emphasis: the law does not care about "I'm not touching you"-level rationalizations.
> The response described is what everyone ought to do without exception when asked for their PIN by law enforcement. The right not to be forced to provide access to your own devices needs to be staunchly defended.
If by "response described" you mean "remain silent," then absolutely. Not 100% clear from your last paragraph.
But it does AFAIK care about plausible deniability. Whether or not any given instance of denial is plausible must of course ultimately be determined by a judge.
> Not 100% clear from your last paragraph.
The "response described" was (I think quite clearly) "provide a duress PIN that wipes the device in violation of the law". I am advocating for civil disobedience in defense of privacy and the right not to self incriminate. These devices have become extensions of ourselves but the law does not currently treat them as such which I see as a violation of my fundamental rights.
Actually even if they were recognized as an extension I don't believe there's any prohibition against reading people's minds. It's just that the technology doesn't exist yet. But it likely will soon so we badly need to update the law to account for that IMO.
There is near zero chance that a judge or jury will decide you have plausible deniability for providing a duress PIN when asked by police for an unlock PIN. It is your phone, you had to configure the duress PIN when setting up the phone, knowing what it does, and provide it to police instead of the unlock PIN.
> I am advocating for civil disobedience in defense of privacy and the right not to self incriminate.
You have a right to silence, not a right to lie, and certainly not a right to lie in a way that is the proximate cause of destruction of evidence during a lawful search. Call the lie civil disobedience all you like, but expect totally avoidable federal felony charges in cases like then one at hand, when all you had to do was remain silent (especially as in this case with a GrapheneOS device).
> I don't believe there's any prohibition against reading people's minds
Common law often doesn't require specific prohibitions (or specific updates in the manner of computer code) because the practice of common law has long functioned on the good faith application of human reason and common sense by jurists. Consider the relevant language of the 5th Amendment: "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..." I think it's extremely likely that, when mind-reading tech is invented, it will be treated as a form of compelled testimony, and therefore impermissible against a defendant (though potentially permissible against a witness with immunity).
We don't have to have brown shirts pulling people off the street, and we also don't need to have this stupid fight over simply enforcing our borders like every other country on the planet. Extremists on both sides are as always, simply incorrect. Reject MAGA, reject DSA.
In context to my OP, none of this stuff or policy really affects most people's day to day lives. If you turned the news off you'd probably have no clue people were jumping the border en masse and you'd likely have no clue that those very same people were being arrested and deported.
This is an indication you don’t understand what is going on. Some illegals have been deported but amongst those illegals are U.S. citizens and people who are legally allowed to be here. They are being deported without judicial oversight and in some cases in direct violation of judicial orders.
… none of this stuff or policy really affects most people's day to day lives.
Man. What a profoundly immoral thing to say and believe. This illegal shit going on doesn’t affect more than 49.999% of the population so… no big deal.
It is people like you that Martin Luther King described in his letter:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
Well it’s more like 95%, and you’re also injecting a false distinction here to suggest 49% of folks think one thing and 51% think another when most Americans have more nuanced views on immigration policy and broadly agree that a legal process must be followed.
I’m ignoring the righteous pearl-clutching (MLK/don’t know what you’re talking about/immoral whatever). I really don’t care.
But now, what you write is it’s only 5% of the people being affected. Damn. So you acknowledge 5% are affected but that’s ok. It’s only 5%. It is profoundly immoral to think nothing is amiss because it only affects 15 million or so people. It’s not righteous pearl clutching to be alarmed when my neighbors are being illegally targeted. Having a conscience and an ounce of empathy is not righteous pearl clutching. As Edmund Burke said, all that is necessary for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.
Illegal wars, illegal deportations, illegal cancellation of appropriated funds, illegal bribes to give pardons, etc. and your response is that the people alarmed by this are engaging in righteous pearl clutching. You are the problem.
I’ll read any response you wrote but won’t respond further. Those who remain silent while others are terrorized are dispicable.
Because it’s true.
> But now, what you write is it’s only 5% of the people being affected.
Well you wrote it was 49% or something. Me saying 5% is still in the bounds of “vast majority not affected”. I’m being generous here as the number is likely even lower and that’s accounting for folks who hired folks or extended family or whatnot.
> It’s not righteous pearl clutching to be alarmed when my neighbors are being illegally targeted.
Are they here illegally? I would expect (aside from heavy handed tactics which I broadly disagree with) that they would eventually be found and deported just like anyone else in any other country. What exactly are you suggesting is “being illegally targeted”?
> Illegal wars, illegal deportations, illegal cancellation of appropriated funds, illegal bribes to give pardons, etc. and your response is that the people alarmed by this are engaging in righteous pearl clutching.
Illegal taxes, illegal immigrants, illegal drone strikes, illegal lockdowns
Don’t accuse me of pearl clutching though. You just have to accept my declaration that things are illegal and anyone who disagrees must be immoral and part of the problem. In the words of some famous person, I declare famous saying!!
That’s the argument you’re making and as an independent who can’t stand MAGA or DSA + associates it’s very tiresome. I reject illegal immigration, and I reject heavy handed policing especially by untrained wannabe-be tough guys. If you’re going to turn that into all of these other accusations you’re extremism is the actual problem, not me.
That is literally the stage we are in now. You sent it because you are in support of it and to cowardly to admit it. It's the same cowardice that motivated them to wear masks
>In context to my OP, none of this stuff or policy really affects most people's day to day lives
The fact that this doesn't bother you speaks volumes about the kind of person you are
No we're not, and when it started to look like we were heading that way in some limited fashion the public fought back and stopped it, people were fired, and the heavy-handed tactics mostly stopped. In true brown shirt regimes (Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, &c.) they don't stop the heavy handed tactics. In Iran they murdered over 30,000 people for it point blank with automatic weapons.
> You sent it because you are in support of it and to cowardly to admit it. It's the same cowardice that motivated them to wear masks
I don't support it. And I've said that multiple times. I also don't think they should wear masks.
I also have no cowardice about saying anything on the Internet. When you write things like that you sound silly. What's going to happen? Do you think I'm going to get in trouble like it's high school or something for saying an opinion that you happen to disagree with that the public by and large agrees with?
We should control our borders and deport people who violate our laws. Also we shouldn't do all these bad things and treat people inhumanely. The horror! The cowardice! Give me a break.
> The fact that this doesn't bother you speaks volumes about the kind of person you are
I didn't say it doesn't bother me, I said that it doesn't affect most people's day-to-day lives. There's a key difference and if you spent less time grandstanding and more time reading what I actually wrote you would realize that difference.
Now? It is all out in the open. They're BOASTING about it. The baddies do whatever they want and noone is going to do anything about it besides write a blog. There will be no 1970s backlash with progressive Supreme Court judges and a senate committee investigating Hover.
This is precisely the time to “overreact”. The government is clearly targeting dissidents and if we don’t “overreact” shit will get much worse.
We have kids sent to concentration camps. We have illegally deported U.S. citizens. The President has canceled monies allocated by Congress and signed into law. He is waging war against Iran without Congressional approval. He is openly selling pardons. The list goes on.
This isn’t enough to get you to “overreact”?
Really? You have no rights now!? Jeez. When did that start? Was it on Inauguration Day or was it like, the day after Trump was elected? Or does it go back to the Obama years? Did you lose your rights when the police could kill, main, or otherwise fuck you up in 2017 or so when Trump was elected the first time and then gain them back when Biden was elected? Or have you never had rights since you were born? I can't seem to recall when police had this special power to officially take away your rights but maybe you know?
It's strange. I also lost my rights as you mentioned yet the other day I prayed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster in public in front of a police cruiser and nothing happened. Can you believe it?
EDIT: Being in the position of not belonging to a group targeted for retribution by the government isn’t an indication of having rights. When black men who are legally carrying guns are murdered by police without consequence then we don’t truly have the right to own guns. It shows that if one ever becomes part of an out group then you too can be targeted.
Clearly you are not part of a targeted group so you feel safe and naively think nothing is amiss. This is ignorant foolishness.
-edit to your edit-
Black people still have rights even if some cops do some dumb, illegal thing.
Many people lived their normal lives through communism with no issue. They ignored bad stuff and abuses just like your tv turning off person.
And yet, they were living in dictatorship. And found out if they tried to do something different.
"Pshhhtt, the regime isn't oppresive. Sure, there is the securitate, but it's much better now, see, they released the political prisoners. Yes, some people got killed, but they were stirring waves, going around saying shit. You got to mind your business and go to work and not mind all the political stuff and you're fine. Ez-pz. Not sure what the fuss is about we are a great country, look how much stuff we make!"
Anyone who has experienced anything like real suffering would tell you the United States is a wonderful country and is a land of freedom and prosperity, even if at times it is flawed and imperfect. Tell the Filipino bakery that just opened in my home town that they live in a dictatorship, go tell the Iranian dissidents in Los Angelas that they had more freedom under the Iranians, go tell the folks in Hong Kong that the US is a brutal dictatorship. You'll get laughed out of the parking lot.
Your dislike of Donald Trump or whatever (he should be in jail because of Jan 6 - uh oh I hope the gestapo doesn't come get me for insulting dear leader - interesting how they can't, isn't it?) doesn't change anything. Was it a dictatorship for the 4 years under Biden's term? Or only a dictatorship while Trump is the elected president? Not only is your characterization incorrect from a philosophical standpoint, it's functionally incorrect too. If we lived in a dictatorship we wouldn't even have elections let alone any number of other constitutional checks. Or have you not been paying attention when the Trump administration loses a court case and quietly accepts the consequences? What dictatorship is bound by the rule of law, can be removed from power by an election, and has to respect Constitutional rights?
Give me a break with this crap.
I think I failed to convey some critical parts with my post. The _feeling_ I describe is the actual outlook that most people had during that time. I am not saying that the US is at that point yet, what I am trying to say is people don't usually wake up one morning and just say "Ah, ok, now I'm living under an oppressive regime" things just change and many times they will defend said regime. Just sample asking a bunch of Chinese people what they think about their current regime. I bet many of them will be quite happy with the arrangement and how things are going although they are clearly living under authoritarianism.
Yes, in many ways the US has many institutions that still work, but they have been eroding at an astonishing speed under the cheers of 1/3 of the population. If I use the same logic of projecting into the future the rate of change that... AI proponents use for example... How free do you think the US will be in 5, 10 years? You're not there yet, but factoring all the things going on, your country has done a capital mistake.
I personally am a bit frightened of what will happen in November since you have a president that has been consistently eroding the rule of law, put sycophants in positions of leadership, showed disdain for the rule of law, and elections and institutions, allies, general competency.
You might confuse my emotion with one of disdain or hatred for the US or, competitive aggression or impotent denial and projecting for dissatisfaction in my own country. ? But that's not it. My emotional state relative to the US is one of someone grieving after a personal hero I used to look up to who got brain damage and now goes down the street with a loaded gun yelling incoherent ramblings.
You are undoubtedly correct that at some point there will be new leadership in the US.
Politics makes leadership change a possibility. Biology makes it an inevitability.
But I don't think the evidence is very strong that switching from one man to a different man, even if the new man wears a blue hat instead of a red hat, will make that much difference against capital and its surveillance state.
This isn't a false equivalence "both sides" argument. I'd greatly prefer the blue hat over the red hat.
But the blue hat only makes the underlying forces of late capitalism a little slower and a little less vicious, while simultaneously legitimizing that system.
The guy doesn't have the stomach for real totalitarianism. Just populism, corruption, and weakening the country.
And considering how right talks about Mandani, Biden, Harris ... it is ridiculous that the derogatory term goes only toward ... people who talk about Trump.
If only I could convey how ridiculous this sounds looking from outside in.
It's becoming more obvious every day. And yeah, people in 1910 watched Europe dominate the world for about 1500 years. Yet it came to an end.
If you want to Speedrun the collapse, vote for trump. He sure is making a good job right now with diplomacy, lack of long term planning and just getting all your allies to hate you.
Besides that, you say to just pick up and leave as if it were that easy. And I suppose if I followed your advice, it could be. Get a divorce, not care about the kids (sorry, but I'm not bringing my daughters there), ignore the fact my parents are in their 80s, server all my friendships, likely end my career.
Not all freedoms are good. Or rather some bindings, like family and other loved ones, are worth it.
Your other morally correct option is to stand and fight.
> If you want to Speedrun the collapse, vote for trump.
This nonsense needs to stop. You can’t vote for him again unless he deigns to run for a lower office (unlikely). Term limits are real. America needs to start planning for the post-Trump era and hopefully mitigate further damage with a blue wave in the midterms. Or with non-MAGA republicans who might even return to actual fiscal conservatism.
America is not an Empire. When America collapses it will definitely lead to societal collapse. The racial tensions are kept under control only because of the mirage of prosperity and equal opportunity. And when the mirage clears it will turn real ugly really fast.
> hopefully mitigate further damage with a blue wave in the midterms. Or with non-MAGA republicans who might even return to actual fiscal conservatism.
I don't think it is possible to fix this as it is a systemic issue. Irrespective of whether the next President is from D or R. All of the elite at the top know that it is a sinking ship, primarily due to the insane debt that has accumulated. There is absolutely no way to clear it the way it is going. Once AI bubble pops that is when downfall accelerates.
> When America collapses it will definitely lead to societal collapse. The racial tensions are kept under control only because of the mirage of prosperity and equal opportunity. And when the mirage clears it will turn real ugly really fast.
You say that like you want it to happen. Continuing to harp on that future is a self fulfilling prophecy. If you want a better America first you have to envision it instead of tearing it down.
It has already started [1]. It has increased 100% since 2015. Just in the past decade alone. This is only reported hate crimes.
> If you want a better America first you have to envision it instead of tearing it down.
That ship has sailed long ago.
> American imperialism is well documented. We have military outposts all over the world. Puerto Rico is still in essence a colony.
Still not an Empire. You can call it an outward expansion or projection of power but not direct control. An Empire has direct control over colonies that send back tributes which run the Kingdom and give its residents prosperity, at the expense of residents of colonies who are taxed and deprived of their wealth. The tributes outweigh whatever growth is happening within the Kingdom itself. Puerto Rico or any of the military outposts are not equivalent. Puerto Rico does not run USA. USA losing Puerto Rico will not do anything to its economic or military power.
[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/which-groups-have-experienced-...
Oh he will run again, and people will vote for him. The theory underpinning this is the fact that he did not serve consecutive terms and if you think that won’t work; all it takes is one party going along with it. And fuck you for downplaying what he is capable of.
If he tries, some states will keep him off the ballot and likely threaten secession if the feds attempt to force him through. That’s the point when doomers like you can decide to get your shit together and forge a compromise, or let the oligarchs have their way and light off a civil war.
The compromise is that corrupt officials on both sides need punished. Both sides need reform. Neither party should have the kind of power Trump has seized. We don’t fix this by voting in a Dem who goes on a GOP witch hunt without also rooting out corruption in the DNC. There has to be enough consensus to pass constitutional reform, and you don’t get there with extremism or hate.
Canada is moving further from US, not closer. Canadians who support Americans are in the minority at the moment.
I'm not sure how a new US president would be able to turn it around.. further more, what's to say that the president thereafter will follow suit? How about the next 5?
You can't turn corrupt officials into honest ones by changing the laws they're already turning a blind eye to. And you can't use systems (such as the political parties and their donors/owners) that exist to further corruption to reign it in.
Americans need to want honest governance, and be willing to go to the mat for it. Until and unless there's a substantial engaged minority will to do so, changing the rules is just theater. And if the government was honest, the existing laws are sufficient. Nothing stops Congress from removing Trump and the Supreme Court tomorrow, save their own lack of interest in doing so.
Personally, I think the best solution is to abandon the federal government as unfit for the purpose. Build a new one to handle what may actually be needed from the states and other existing and new interstate and international organizations. This will not be easy (gross understatement) but I think it is still more likely to succeed than any attempt to fix the current Constitutional government.
What matters is the taxi, not the checkers. Stuff like tax returns is window dressing.
The USSR is a great example: it took 65 years to fall, and the collapse didn't bring it to anything particularly good.
It has already lost. America lost in Vietnam. Lost in Afghanistan. Turned Middle East into a humongous mess. Now losing badly in Iran. The only "wins" it had were against Countries where odds were already heavily in its favor (in other words invading tiny countries that did not have the technological wherewithal or the will necessary to fight back).
> 10y later they're richer than ever
The rich are richer than ever yes. Ask any common American citizen and he/she will come chasing after you for saying this.
> its companies have global dominance of the most world-changing technology of the last 20y. I just don't think "the collapse" is coming anytime soon.
That dominance is fast eroding. America itself has ended globalization. It is retreating from many crucial positions: like when it comes to cross-border payments, protecting freedom of navigation in high seas, deals that it had previously negotiated with all countries of the World, unable to protect allies in the Middle East and even in South East Asia, not delivering on defense commitments with partner nations... the list goes on and on.
> If anyone's interested in a friendly wager, my email is open. I'll happily go 1:1 odds that America will have a new president come 2029 and the country will still remain the world's richest and most powerful.
None of us believe America will collapse by 2029 and that there wouldn't be another President (unless Trump is really stupid enough to go down that route which I don't think he will). But by 2045? Yeah absolutely is possible.
Overall as a country, undoubtedly. However, a vast majority of Americans are worse off than a decade ago.
A lot of wealth was created, relatively little went to the people though.
But excuse me, Mr Masked Man, let me call the local police just in case you're not actually federal agents... is probably going to get the same reaction whether they're criminals or ICE agents.
Has it truly become widespread enough that you can safely assume that masked men in unmarked vans are federal agents? That’s absurd.
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well - all actions look like a knee-jerk reactions and hail marys to try to regain the power.
I'm pretty sure that barring shenanigans we'll get an D president next time. I'm also pretty sure that we're kicking many cans (economic and otherwise) down the road that are set to blow up during the next administration so that we'll likely be back here again in 2032 with an R. Remember, after Watergate Carter was able to win in 1976 because people were tired of corruption - at the time most people thought that another R administration wouldn't happen for a couple of decades at least. But Reagan(R) won just 4 years later in 1980.
I'm also pretty sure that given the goldfish memory that most American voters have that a hereditary Trump dynasty isn't at all off the table. Look at the Philippines: they have a Marcos in power again. Look at Peru: they've got a Fujimori in power again.
“ he has been ensnared by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive issued by President Trump last September that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include crimes like getting in the way of immigration enforcement. His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific code is entered.”
So, while “no privacy at the border” has always been a thing, the re-categorisation of this as “domestic terrorism” is new.
I think it's more effective to stick to our own history because this country has always been a struggle for workers outside of a small very respite after WW2 that has been actively fought against and weakened since.
Vote
> Is it effective?
Obviously yes. Imagine for a second that you're a MAGA supporter, anti-abortion, stick it to the liberals type of person. Would you say that voting has been effective to get the things you care about passed into law (or repealed)?
You absolutely would.
> The social dynamics are the same - the abuses, the selective enforcement, the lack of recourse, the same characters in the roles of various levels of "law enforcement" and "politics"
What you're describing is politics in general. The question is not whether abuses occur (they do, everywhere), but whether the system is built to be resilient and course-correct over time.
The thing about freedom is not just that it's less miserable than the alternative; more importantly, freedom enables a feedback loop where people's individual choices carry corrective information: what they buy, what they sell, how much, at what price, who they vote for, what they write/publish, what they read, what they say etc. The system at large can correct itself over time if (a) these choices are allowed to have power to influence the system, and (b) the courts enforce justice without interference by the ruling party.
Not a single communist country in the 20th century stayed communist for more than a few years when only 2 freedoms were allowed: (1) freedom of the press, and (2) freedom of the courts from control by the ruling party.
The Soviets and East Germans suppressed every form of freedom that carried information or potential corrective power, because they maxxed on staying in power above all - they effectively had to. No one wants to be under real communism/socialism[0], so for it to be stable it has to be maximally suppressive.
[0] see various records of escape attempts, such as https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/politics-and-governm...
Some dark, dark things happened in the USA, and almost every progression had a corresponding backslide - but the tick-tock has always ticked further towards a freer, more equal, and more equitable society.
Progress doesn’t always (ever?) require complete collapse.
I’m willing to hope this era is another ‘tock’. But that does require people to not just give up (or even work to accelerate the backslide?!) as you seem to be suggesting is the best course of action.
This is a popular sentiment, not a statement of historical fact. Arguments both for and against this are credible.
There are just so many ways in which this seems crazy to me. I feel like you think you’re luring me into some sort of rhetorical trap - but to pick the two elephants in the room, a large proportion of the population was literally owned by other people, and only white male landowners could vote.
One area that this extremely obviously does not align with is immigration. Privacy is another area in steady decline for generations.
It’s very reasonable to consider that in many areas we may regress to a mean somewhere in between founding days and the peak.
On your particular example, there are lots of debates to be had about forms of taxation and which kinds are ‘fairer’ - but more importantly, and more overwhelmingly: eighteen percent of the population of America was literally owned by other people in 1790. They couldn’t ‘spend freely from the fruits of one's labor’ to any extent at all.
Or even 50 years ago? Even in the 1970s, there were places in the United States that women couldn't get a checking account without a man co-signing on the loan.
We can certainly take issue with how rich countries oppress and exploit poor countries today, but you can't honestly say it is worse today than it was during colonialism.
That's just too ridiculous and absurd for most people to accept, thankfully. I accept reality, not social media narratives.
This is HN. https://xkcd.com/538/
Not a snowflake’s chance in hell unless the DSA metaphorically push the doddering old guard down the stairs.
I agree that the courts are not predictable in that way, and what I'm talking about will be based on which party controls the house and senate. If the dems win enough seats in both, it's entirely possible for him to be impeached in the house and convicted in the senate. We won't know what the makeup of the house and senate will be after the midterms, so that remains to be seen.
I have exactly zero expectations of real consequences to Trump. He has far too much popular support for that to be realistic. But I will say that everybody else in his regime better hope he writes them a broad preemptive pardon before he leaves office because the teflon only works for him.
That's the problem. He has wide support despite gestures around. The thing a large part of the population supports _this_. It's not going away. This is the reason that people are bearish on US future.
This is obviously pure speculation on my part, but I think it's quite plausible.
1) Nazi Germany, following debt/inflationary collapse of Weimar Republic.
2) Bolshevik Revolution, following WWI induced debt collapse of Tsars.
3) French Revolution, following debt collapse of Monarchy.
Now where are we? 40 trillion in debt. The interest is $1.1 trillion the amount added to it yearly is $2.1 trillion. The entirety of a government spending would need to be wiped out just to keep it where it is.
If you had the books that got burned, you’d know the cycle, and the fact that electing democrats isn’t gonna change a damn thing.
Where the money is not coming from are consumers. There is no consumer market for AI that stands a chance of making these companies profitable.
It's a bubble. Just like the sub-prime mortgage loan debacle of 2008. It's going to burst. These companies are large enough that the government will declare them necessary, and will give a large portion of the taxes we pay to these companies to keep them afloat.
Ah yes, the government bailout, and the government will decide who pays the real price. And that will be me, and you and the rest of us that aren't rich.
These AI companies are aware of this, or they wouldn't take the gamble. So I would have to disagree and say that the government is and will be involved in how all of this plays out.
This is 100% wrong.
Look at Anthropic's quarterly revenue from AI sales ($11B), OpenAI (6.7B) and XAI ($5B). That's $23B a quarter or $100B annualized. And it's still growing.
Inesting $1T when your revenue is 10% annually and growing quickly is not unusual.
unclear as to where you got this number
The border is the thing that makes the state and have been since states first emerged about 5,000 years ago. If the state cannot preserve its border it is no longer a state.
For the most part nothing has changed.
If you mean non-citizens? Well, I invite you to check out many other places all across the world who also pick and choose who they will allow to visit.
his rights still did apply and do apply for now at least
Except, while not in this case, they've done exactly that in hundreds of cases at this point.
If you come to the UK the police are allowed to stop you without suspicion and force you to answer their questions honestly or be charged with a crime for remaining silent or lying. You must also give them access to all of your devices if asked, or again face criminal charges.
Most people here are okay with it though. Ultimately if you're not doing anything wrong you'll probably be okay.
Sorry arrogant bitch, it's not gonna happen
I would not present a phone to customs that had clearly just been wiped.
That kind of thinking has landed a whole lot of people in prison.
You know how they say ignorance of the law is no excuse? That holds true even if the law seems unreasonable or incomprehensible.
It's legal to refuse to provide a PIN/password in the US. He's a US citizen so they couldn't refuse him entry. If he wasn't then the result would be getting deported.
It likely would have been a much better decision to refuse to provide the PIN/password and rely on the encryption and device security instead. He could have done a reboot or shutdown in advance but even without that it would have done it automatically via the locked device auto-reboot timer. The secure element only allows 20 attempts for key derivation with rapidly growing delays between those. If he had a strong passphrase then even a secure element exploit wouldn't obtain the data protected by it.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780>
(From the HN GrapheneOS account about a month ago.)
OP is talking about just backing up what you need off-phone and then wiping it.
We were talking about an attacker taking an image of the SSD prior to it being wiped not helping them because information needed to derive the key encryption keys is gone from the secure element. It similarly doesn't help them to do a brute force on a server farm since they're rate limited by the secure element. It only allows 20 attempts and has rapidly increasing delays between those. There's also hardware bound key derivation but that only helps improve the strength of a decent password. The secure element rate limiting makes even a random 6 digit PIN highly insecure unless an attacker can exploit the secure element.
(Very much appreciate your active participation here.)
Under normal circumstances, you don't have. BUT there is schedule 7 powers: https://www.counterterrorism.police.uk/what-we-do/counter-te...
> Under Schedule 7, a police officer with the mandated accreditation does not need prior authority or suspicion to stop, question, search, or if necessary, detain someone. However, they may only stop and question a person for the purpose of allowing a determination of whether that person appears to be someone who is or who has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.
How this is abused on the other hand, I presume, might depend on your skin shade.
https://cellebrite.com/en/blog/the-access-gap-is-closed-what...
https://www.magnetforensics.com/graykey-for-android-devices/
i dont think it was ideological....
i bring a new device just for traveling and wireguard rdp (iphone mirror) into my home desktop
Would you care to post screenshots of your inboxes and browser history for the class?
> Would you care to post screenshots of your inboxes and browser history for the class?
i would be since i dont have anything to hide, do you have anything to hide or find embarassing ? I don't maybe my credit score, a few porn sites and password resets to some dating sites. I don't really care if authorities see it because there's nothing remotely illegal involved.
Mr. Tunick does seem like had illegal activities to hide from the article it seems like he was part of some politically motivated group then to make it worse it seems like he folded under pressure and did reveal what he was hiding. This alone is the worst possible thing you either go all the way 1st amendment bare detention and hardship or jst use a non graphene device with nothing on it.
rn graphene is just asking to be detained just get a second device, you just look more guilty than necessary.
graphene is an excellent piece of software im just not convinced the people who are using it are aware of the heat it brings them.
also i can't help but suspect that anyone entering duress pin to wipe the device are innocent. if it was something embarrassing and nothing illegal theres no need to even install graphene.
i can't help but conclude people who are installing graphene are involved in illegal activities when i see the news
Don't think GrapheneOS suggests guilt, seeing how they're tracking everyone without a warrant and going after people for things that are very defensible under 1A. Also some people don't want to be subject to Googliness, that's fair. But duress code on top of that... I know the govt can't treat that as guilt, but I personally find it sus.
the authorities dont care about your edward snowden insired views on privacy, they already suspect you and you wipe your device before inspection then they have no choice but to treat you with suspicion
i think that if you were a real hardcore criminal, like a cartel boss,you would not even carry graphene on you, everything would be done through intermediaries who have a chain of people to take the fall.
Is it right? It makes no difference, Customs can make your life miserable, that's just the reality of it, always has been and it can't have gotten better in recent times.
E: but seriously, what happens to non citizens. What happens if you bring a burner/wiped phone? I assume digit forensics can confirm it was pre wiped but what's topping them from alleged you wiped on US soil.
My fondest border experience was many years ago when entering France; this was before the UK had joined the EU. (Our later exit was dumb, IMO.)
Anyhow, a youngish officer - probably mid-20s or so - examined my passport while asking questions, in perfect English. His voice was even and his demeanour calm and professional. Then he took a step back, closed my passport and put it in his pocket. A few seconds later, he started laughing and said: "The look on your face. Priceless. Welcome to Paris."
He really had me and I saluted him for that.
How was this different from deleting the same data the day before instead of on the spot?
The argument goes that the crime is essentially knowingly depriving the police of something they want.
The problem isn't that the phone was blank, it's that it wasn't blank, and then when the authorities wanted to look at it, and you caused it to be blank to thwart them.
Ok well all of those supposed key differentiating factors also apply the day before travelling.
You knew you would be crossing a border, and knew you might be searched there, and knew you would have no right to object or resist, and so as a direct response to that knowledge, took action to deprive those authorities of something you knew they might want, by wiping your phone the day before travelling and carrying no data with you into the zone of inhumanity.
This would probably still "work" today and might have worked for him this time, but that's just luck and progression. If more people do that and the jackboots start to identify it as the source of their inconvenience, what prevents them from declaring that illegal? It's all exactly the same argument.
All it needs is to become a more common practice, and then it gets a handy name like "pre-cleansing", and then you can be charged for the crime of pre-cleansing.
Maybe we should just make it illegal to own tech that you even have the power to delete yourself in the first place. If you want to wipe your device, you can't because it's not allowed to run custom software, and even if you simply physically destroy it, they at least know it happened (and where and when) from the loss of telemetry and they have the non optional cloud storage anyway.
Then we can charge people for destroying evidence by knowingly avoiding generating it in the first place. You are guilty of the crime of attempting to evade prosecution by not commiting a crime.
That's where we are already. The current case has exactly that same absurdity.
"I have an opinion on the legal matter. But I think it's worth noting that destroying the data was a categoric strategic blunder by the defendant. If you don't destroy the data, but just don't provide the password, they might never be able to recover the data, perhaps with the exception of a multi million dollar cryptographic attack.
Destroying the data is a strategic mistake even if there's a mildly strong case that deleting the data is a crime, as it provides no benefit at the cost of increasing the risk of being sentenced for evidence tampering. I personally am not appealed by the grapheneOS thing, but I can't see any case were that feature would be beneficial, it sounds like a shitty technology."
To me this is evidence tampering, and again to me, it's a great law to have that evidence cannot be destroyed. But even if you argue that it's a bad law, and even if you argue that this was not evidence tampering, you have to concede that it IS the law and that it IS highly likely that courts will find it to be evidence tampering, finally that there is little value to destroying encrypted evidence. It's a categoric legally strategic mistake.
And GrapheneOS is a dumb product by consequence for this matter, unless you are like some high level spy whose security model is being tortured or dissapeared instead of being put to jail.
e.g. in Hungary the authorities treat it as a felony to possess an equipment that can record video or sound and it's not obvious when looking at it. 2-8 years in prison for mere posession, i.e. even if it's turned off in your backpack. random nonsense that if it can also make phone calls then it doesn't qualify (the above is the law paraphrased).
You know, the same way we would be rightfully outraged if Apple was allowing applications to turn on the web cam without signaling to the user that the camera is engaged.
That’s all aside from the fact that Hungary was run by authoritarian minded people. But just as I think it should be illegal for cameras installed in glasses to work without an indicating light, I don’t see how this recording light situation you are describing is really such a highlight of Orban’s excesses.
UK is same.
*https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-family-120-days-...
*https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/20/...
Stuff like this incident (plus the whole surveillance gambit) just being a reflex out of fear, desperate to stay in power just a little bit longer. The funny part is, in the lashing out, they're exposing themselves and their true nature to an extent that the old illusions are fading fast. I implore people to never forget: your government is comprised of other citizens who are exactly like you; they're neither special nor omnipotent. They're just collecting a paycheck under a title.
If memory serves, I think this is also suggested in the book The Fourth Turning but don't hold me to that.
Forgive my ignorance, but how is any of this true? Frontier LLM labs are practically begging governments to tell them how to act, the most profitable class of technology company is surveillance-focused (like Flock and Palantir) precisely because the government money is ubiquitous and unquestioning, and everyone else is "donating" money as fast as they can and getting blanket legal indemnification in return.
The logic (again, IMO) is that if large swaths of these governments can be superseded by AI itself—which they're abundantly aware of—then over time we'll see their size organically shrink (but I would anticipate that shrinking to be preceded by an explosive growth first—just like an animal will puff itself up as a defense mechanism).
The money to labs is another fear/panic move: fork over money to your destructor so that it's more benevolent towards your favor when it finally brings down the hammer—that's why they tried to assert dominance over Mythos, etc (appear strong when you're weak). That may sound crazy to someone technical, but realize, most of the people coming into contact with this stuff think it's fucking HAL 9000.
Assuming that foreign competition makes the frontier labs irrelevant (based on my own recent experiments w/ stuff like Kimi K3, this is increasingly likely) or at least, not worthy of current domestic investment levels, you'll see a pullback in the markets. The markets are the only gunpowder the current day government has for propping up their illusion. If that goes, psychologically, it will be impossible to convince most citizens short of direct violence that they need to remain in power much longer.
I'm not presenting this as a "tomorrow" or "ten years from now" shift. I'd guess this will be more on order of 30-50 years, stair stepped. And in the step down, I anticipate full bore authoritarian chaos as the candy and toys get taken away. Maybe even a dictator or two emerging in the places we'd least expect.
So, I would read this less as "reading my crystal ball" and more like "some internet guy's moderately schizophrenic read on the current state of chaos."
[1] - See stories from 20 years ago about people being turned away from law enforcement roles for having "too high an IQ". Or recent stories (such as one I heard on the podcast of a former FBI agent) about new recruits who can't read.
I wince at the disrespect shown to the profession on message board threads (in part because it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and in part because it's so clear that the people expressing that disrespect would be less happy if they couldn't make these arguments --- i.e., they want policing to be bad), but normal people love police. Our resident beat officer showed up at our block parties and was a minor celebrity.
You can refuse to hand over access. You can't go torch evidence. Caught Ollie North as well.
If he wiped his phone before crossing the border, he would have been fine.
If he refused to give his password to the phone, he would have been held up for a bit and then he would have to leave his phone, but he would be fine. American citizens cannot be denied entry into the US.
The difference is that the phone was wiped while it was under investigation because of an instruction he gave the CBP. That was ill-advised because that is clearly obstruction. He didn't understand the law and now he's probably going to pay for it.
And I say this as someone who had a very bad experience at the border. A CBP accused me of not being the same person on my Green Card and I had to wait 15 mins for that to clear up even though there was nothing to dispute here, it was me. The CBP are fascists and it doesn't matter who is president, this was during Obama's presidency.
Law....is just license and permit....not security or safety or anything related to quality, or outcome....
It is purely process....and those who wield it can choose to apply it or withhold it....when the law is applied...then the imaginary world it defines is then enforced on the real world...materially this requires force or volition.... but lbr....its mostly convoluted propaganda and inertial power....and the law keeps that status quo...
If you are in anyway going to disrupt the power brokers....they will not let you....regardless of law or not
Either way the USA needs to stop abusing its citizens. The people need to take back control over the court system. Way too much abuse is happening here. Land of the free no more.
You can try this "gift link" to the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/politics/samuel-tunick...
"On March 5, 2023, dozens of people attacked the Cop City construction site with rocks and firebombs, destroying construction equipment."
I can kinda see why this is considered terrorism
But the man was also hated by the cops because of his activism. They were going to catch him for something, some day. This incident just provided the necessary excuse to lock him up.
That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? If there was no suspicion whatsoever, hence no investigation, then he couldn’t possibly obstruct it.
This also doesn't even get to the more important point: If you don't have the contents of the phone you have literally no evidence of a crime being committed, other than the one they invented post-facto: "Deleting data that could hypothetically be incriminating, not in any specific way but just generally, maybe".
People have gone to jail or have been executed for less than a glitch. Theoretically a highly charged particle from space could've messed with exactly the right transistors exactly when entering the correct PIN and trigger the wipe process. There is no way to prove that didn't happen. But you don't need that kind of proof.
The fact phones don't usually wipe themselves will be plenty good for a judge.
Btw: Regardless of the above I support this guy's right to protect his private data from baseless and unreasonable searches. He should not be charged with a crime.
funny reading this (don't disagree) and then also reading on HN how China is "bad" this is some gestapo shit but not surprising that it is getting normalised ...
Excessive border patrol power has been around in the USA for ages now, it's all part of the post-9/11 package. I don't think many Americans even know they live in a zone where the border police can do shit like this, even if they haven't left the country, as international airports are usually near big cities, and they have a wide border zone around them. This stuff only really makes it into the news when it happens to one of the "good guys".
It is pretty clear to me that law enforcement conspired to abuse a border crossing to effect basically an unconstitutional search ("fishing expedition"), which it would never have gotten a warrant for.
This is them being spiteful after that whole thing failed. Note how law enforcement basically admits this on the record. The whole thing is a disgrace; every decisionmaker involved in this should be sacked immediately.
At this point, people should buy a burner phone when going to/from the US. In that phone only have a couple of phone numbers and that's it.
If you get charged with a crime, things are very different.
There is no court at the border. If the agent decides you're going to jail, you're going to jail. The decision may be reversed/corrected after, but it's still going to be a big, expensive problem for you and you _are_ going to be detained for a time.
Not to mention walking up with an empty phone and telling the agent to "fuck off" when they ask about it sure sounds eerily similar to the facts of the case in the linked article. I'd wager that's a good way to land an obstruction charge.
For the second part, having an empty phone is not a crime, and being arrested for this would be a major scandal. The tech press and political outlets would be all over it. It’s generally a good idea to avoid directly antagonizing border guards, though.
What are you even on about? Having a blank phone is obstruction?
This comes across as fearmongering to keep people from protecting themselves.
Believe it or not, due process still generally exists and most people still benefit from taking precautions to protect themselves. That’s not to imply that things are great or that we aren’t in a time of declining civil liberties.
Seriously, there is something wrong with privacy doomers.
You can, and should, try to protect yourself as much as possible. That still doesn’t change the fact that the current admin will just ignore the rule of law and ship you off to a third party country because they decided they didn’t like you.
I have other opinions on what you should do in the face of a government that doesn’t follow the rule of law but I will be banned from this website if I state them out loud.
Issuing 'burner phones' and laptops to staff visiting countries such as China or the USA is now SOP for many companies handling sensitive data, including mine.
Don't think this isn't unusual.
A couple weeks before your trip, factory reset whatever burner phone you're planning on using and swap your SIM card over. Install a few basic apps you wouldn't mind them looking through. Enable hotspot/tethering, and connect your other phone via Wi-Fi.
For a couple of weeks, use the burner as much as you can with what is available on it. When you're driving, us the maps app for GPS. Make and receive some calls, ignore some spam calls. Read the news. Get a few inane text messages conversations going, etc.
When you travel, leave your regular phone at home and take the burner. When it's searched at the border, it has enough activity to pass most initial smell tests. If asked, you dropped your other phone and didn't have time to get it fixed before your trip, this is one a friend lent you.
This has worked for me. Never _actually_ into anything illegal, but just apparently had a suspicious vibe about me or something because every time I crossed the border into or out of the country I was spending 4-5 hours getting searched. Didn't need someone going through my entire life going back decades every time--once was enough.
At the end of the day, it's always best to just not have anything "bad" on your devices. People have been caught up for all numbers of "innocent" reasons (pictures of their kids in the bathtub, ancient photos in their albums of themselves doing illegal things such as drugs or underage drinking, text messages or browser history disparaging politicians the border guard may support, porn in your history) that can give a border guard in a bad mood good reason to ruin your day.
I personally don't want my phone data hoovered in and analyzed or marked, even though I don't really have anything to hide. I don't care enough to do anything about it, but if I did I would probably have a second travel phone with a curated amount of data, apps, accounts, etc.
At this point? This has been standard practice for a while now.
It was likely unnecessary to use the duress PIN/password. He likely would have been better off simply refusing to provide the PIN/password. He could have rebooted or powered off the device before going through but even without that it would have automatically rebooted itself after 18 hours by default, or a lower time if he had configured one.
With a lot more preparation he could have done an encrypted backup, wiped the device and restored it later but that's very inconvenient.
1. You factory reset your phone before entering the US and give it to CBP blank. There's nothing to find;
2. You have a self-destruct PIN like this guy did and give it CBP so it destroys the phone's contents.
Tech people will say that these two things are functionally the same. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the law works. If you factory reset your phone first with the intention of restoring it after entry, that's completely fine (legally). You could've factory reset that for any reason. But as soon as an officer wants to search your phone, now you're engaging in evidence destruction (spoliation). The destruction to the phone's contents was done in response to an unfortunately lawful search.
Even if you don't want to factory reset your phone, you can probably just delete (or even log out) of key apps. They can still get messages but if you're so concerned about that, use WhatsApp or whatever.
None of this should be necessary but we are where we are. But whatever you do, don't use a self-destruct PIN if you don't want to be charged with a felon and likely to be found guilty.
A factory reset done in anticipation of a search is not as different from using a duress feature as you believe it is. Forensics software would have clearly identified the device was recently factory reset. It would provide another defense argument by arguing it was wiped for another reason, but whether that would be believed by a court is unknown. It would make a difference if there was a good argument about why it was done, but it isn't necessary for this to have been done instead for wiping the device to have been legal.
Once he was in the situation already, the best move was very likely refusing to provide the PIN/password indefinitely and only talking to them to demand access to lawyer. There are strong protections against data extraction and it's highly unlikely they would have been able to get the data from it. Refusing to provide a PIN/password is protected under the 5th amendment in the US and these rights do exist at the border. They can turn away a non-citizen but they can't refuse entry to an American citizen because they won't provide a PIN/password. They could waste a lot of his time but he'd get access to a lawyer and would get released. They could make a court case over demanding the PIN/password and they'd nearly certainly lose. He'd likely spend months or even years without getting back his phone of course.
If they had a video recording of him entering the PIN/password from somewhere, they could have used that to get the data. By using the duress PIN/password, he prevented it. It was probably not necessary to keep the data safe, but that's unknown.
With only a tiny bit of preparation time, rebooting or powering off the device would have gotten it into Before First Unlock state without the locked device auto-reboot timer needing to complete. In Before First Unlock state, a decent random 6 digit PIN is enough for the data stored protected with it to be highly secure without an extremely sophisticated secure element exploit. If the device had a strong passphrase, then no level of sophisticated exploits would recover that data.
This is where machine-like personal consistency is deeply important to opsec. Not just for technical reasons, but for legal reasons also.
If you wipe your phone before every national border crossing and restore it after every border crossing as a part of your standard procedure for travel, it will be much harder for a prosecutor to argue that you have ever done so in anticipation of some particular search. If your employer's security policy mandates doing so, that is even more evidence against anticipating a specific search. If a large body of infosec/cybersecurity professionals advise a wipe/reset of your phone before any and all international travel, that is further evidence for defense.
If you're the subject of a lawful search and you destroy evidence rather than handing it over, that's spoliation. It has legal consequences. Courts are allowed to assume that whatever was destroyed was detrimental to you or your case. You can be charged with it as well. That's basically what happened here.
Consider this example: many companies have an email retention policy where emails will be automatically deleted after a period. I've heard of cases where this has been as little as 14 days. Typically though it's 1-5 years. One of the reasons companies do this is so discovery can't go and dredge up something really old in a lawsuit.
If this is a company policy then that's actually fine (ignoring any regulations or legislation tabout required retention).
Once you get subpoenaed you may get a hold on your email. The company is then required to retain it reagardless of this policy. If you then delete an email, that too is spoliation.
Do you see the difference? CBP can search your device. As soon as they request it, deleting the contents, regardless of what it contains is a crime. Wiping your phone before every border crossing as standard practice is not.
"We will jail if you don't comply" is questionable grounds. There has to be explicit suspicion of something specific. Otherwise it's a fishing expedition, and questionably lawful.
Do the TSA and CBP get more latitude? Yes, but only up to a point. And that point is constantly being challenged.
It is not the same as resisting a lawful search. That's more likely to be obstruction.
It also not the same as deleting evidence when you're on notice that a case against you is incoming. That is legally much more straightforward.
Of course the reality is this government DGAF about freedom or constitutional rights. It has already shot people in the streets in cold blood for no good reason.
So this is a risky move.
But... there's been significant judicial pushback against overreach.
Ultimately it's a constitutional issue, but different states have different policies and attitudes to that.
https://www.hornwright.com/civil-rights-law/illegal-search-s...
Clinton's IIRAIRA bill literally introduced expedited removal procedures and created the concept of 'administrative warrants', routinely used by CBP/ICE today.
Without the IIRAIRA, removal would be substantially harder.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/2202
https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/3610
It's easier than ever to check legal assertions before you post instead of posting incorrect information.
He said the IIRAIRA "ratifies my administration's comprehensive immigration strategy". In the 1996 State of the Union he strongly condemned illegal immigration and touted a 50% increase in border controls, while pledging to use federal government contract steering power to punish businesses hiring them.
How exactly is this not a Clinton bill? That's like saying the Affordable Care Act was not an Obama bill because he did not draft it. Just complete revisionism.
Some notable Democrats voted for the bill, too. Dianne Feinstein, Joe Biden.
How exactly is this not a Clinton bill? That's like saying the Affordable Care Act was not an Obama bill because he did not draft it. Just complete revisionism.
Sure...if you believe it's common for American presidents' signature legislation to be introduced by the opposition party and get 5-10x more support from them than his own party. It passed with 370 R to 37 D votes in the House and 84 to 15 in the Senate.
That quote is damning, no?
hundreds of Democrats
37 + 15 = 52