this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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To be fair, a duress pin is definitely a good thing to have if you're being mugged, but using it to deliberately destroy data when it's been seized by a lawful authority is guaranteed to land you in serious trouble pretty much anywhere. Whether the border agents were, in fact, a lawful authority, and whether they had a lawful reason to seize his phone are very different questions.
The much more sensible approach is to either have a separate phobe for travelling, that has nothing you care about on it, or wipe your phone before you travel, and spend a little time building up an innocuous history on it, without putting anything you care about on it. Anything you absolutely must have access to while you're away can be stored, encrypted, online, and you can remember the details to retrieve it.
Third option: Refuse to give your phone credentials unless these fascist pigs have a warrant or provide you with a lawyer.
What about give them the wrong pin, they initiate the device wipe, then you say they did it intentionally?
That's what happened
That is what happened. The accused told the boarder agent the duress pin when asked. The agent entered the pin that initiated the wipe.
Could make a difference at trial, didn't stop the case prior to the arrest.
Then a lot of it could come down to the wording the officer used. If they just asked 'what's the passcode' then the person DID give them a passcode.