Technology

The headline is wrong.

Fascist regime fucks over people's constitutional rights and could send a man to prison for protecting his own privacy.

There, fixed.

Land of the "free"...

This is fucking stupid. If I delete something on my phone while I'm on vacation am I going to prison because the border patrol might have wanted to look at it?

The indictment alleges that Tunick knowingly deleted the phone’s digital contents

My hot take: the officer wiped the phone. With their own hands. They're just stupid.

Without a warrant, it's literally his phone to do with it what he pleases. Baffled that that's not the end of the conversation.

Assuming we lived in a rational world with a fair and impartial justice system, and not one that exists to funnel money from the working class into the Epstein class and kill or imprison everyone that makes that less easy.

Write the duress PIN on a piece of paper in your wallet. Someone searching your phone is probably also searching your wallet and may try the PIN.

The charge treats the alleged wipe as destruction of property intended to prevent a government seizure.

He is being charged with destroying "evidence" but he was never charged with anything in the first place. That is like saying deleting any files at home is a crime. I'd think forcing you to present evidence necessary to charge you with something would fall under the constitutional right against self-incrimination.

What a shithole

GrapheneOS should update the duress passcode to load a dummy profile like Only Key’s Plausible Deniability Feature.

Idr if this was a feature that made it into a real OS or just a concept that never came to be, but...

I recall reading about a duress pin that instead of deleting stuff, just booted up normally... but to basically a separate user profile. From the non-duress profile you could choose features that would be shared between the two, like texts or call history of specific people, browser history, photo albums, etc.

So "sure officer, it's 5224" would open up a phone profile that looks convincingly used, with nice long trails of cat memes and chatter with your gaming buddies about your favorite franchise enshittifying, and so on.

Punch in your real pin to unlock it though, and it's got full access to everything, including data you want to keep private.

...and, uh, if any of you are designing a mobile OS right now, here's your feature suggestion!

Guys don't travel to fascist countries.

If the duress pin makes obvious it's the duress pin then it's not really doing its job. It should instead open a profile with not much in it while erasing the other profile and files in the background.

What law did he break? Vs the warrantless search that is breaking the law. If only the supreme court didn't give them a pass.

I'm half-expecting for it to turn out that he was being wholly compliant, and he's being accused of destruction of evidence because they were looking for something that never existed to begin with.

Prosecuted for what, exactly? If push comes to shove, it's a fifth amendment issue.

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.