Citizen enforces his own right to the Fourth Amendment and is prosecuted by the government for not letting them try to find incriminating evidence on him. For something. Maybe. Because he looks suspicious.
I hope that lawyer gets it thrown out. I’m not holding my breath. We’ve gone so far into fascism I’m not sure it’ll take anything less than violence to end it.
FYI if you are using GrapheneOS with the duress password, you can natively backup your phone. Its in settings.
For people that don’t want to be dragging into a civil rights case, can you set up a dummy interface that looks used, but doesn’t have any too important available? Like you only owned the phone for a week?
You can setup different users on GrapheneOS and switch between them.
There is also a “private area” in the bottom of the app list where you can move sensitive apps and password protect them.
Either way, allowing a malicious actor into that profile exposes more attack surface for them to exploit.
Idk. Security is a journey, not a destination.
no he didn’t. They asked for a password that the phone would accept. They weren’t even supposed to ask, but he gave them one. They’re the ones who entered it on the phone. And by extension they’re the ones who erased the phone.
Plus he provided a passcode that unlocked the device I don’t see the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampering_with_evidence
Tunick’s attorneys accused the government of demanding access to his phone under the pretext of searching for child exploitation imagery, but without providing evidence to justify its suspicion.
Even if I had more information, I still wouldn’t have the law chops to predict where this may lead.
I don’t have those chops either. Also NAL. The wiki page says Tampering charges require there to be an ongoing investigation, which wasn’t the case here, so I’m thinking it wouldn’t apply. But! I wonder about spoliation. Spoliation before a case is brought, while not illegal per se, can result in negative inference,
spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a trier of fact can draw from a party’s destruction of evidence that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding
Negative inference, to my NAL understanding, means the tampered evidence may be taken in the worst light for the defense. Here, it’s all resting on flimsy and politically motivated pretext with no evidence. Still.
Needs an immigration lawyer to give an answer to this, but I’m thinking it may be legally safer to have strong encryption and refuse to unlock, rather than to wipe. Not unlocking isn’t tampering, so no spoliation, but wiping might be. Well, safest of all is to use a burner. But next best, strong encryption + don’t unlock. CBP can confescate the device, but they cannot compel you to produce a pw or unlock code.
From what I’ve gathered, I think you’re right to assume it’s legally safer to refuse to unlock rather than wipe. Also, worth noting that you can be compelled to unlock with biometrics, but not a password. On grapheneOS this means simply shutting off/restarting your device as it requires a pw after a fresh boot, even if biometrics is enable.
you can be compelled to unlock with biometrics, but not a password
Yah, I’ve been trying to get my friends to use a pw rather than biometric unlock, for that exact reason.
I’m batting like 0 for 5, lol. Biometrics are just too convenient I guess. Plus they don’t think it will impact them personally. Which is prob true. I still think it’s best to use the way that preserves more civil rights. I just can’t convince them.
Sheep will always be sheep.
Yeah, people have their own threat model and trade-offs they’re willing to make for security/convenience and it’s probably a lot lower for most people than if they knew more about the landscape and gave it careful thought. It sounds like other mobile devices might reencrypt after reboot. IDK about the pw v. bio, though, but if it’s like Grap.OS just convincing them to reboot their device before going through TSA checkpoints or other areas where their device might get confiscated may improve their security with minimal effort.
US is a dystopia
this is literally what they accuse china of
“Sorry, my fat American fingers accidentally entered the wrong code, you understand.”
From what I read, upon demand he gave the code to the Investigator, whomst had to watch the phone start to load and then erase it self. What a joy it must have been to watch them gifauh at that
The authorities conducting the illegal search entered the code, so the phone owner could assert that he gave them the right password and they were the ones that screwed it up. It’s a bit late for that argument, but someone could use that in the future and there’d be no way to prove it wrong.
Hmm this sounds like government overreach 🤔
for research purposes, how would one go about setting this up?
I can’t seem to find it in my set up. There is no option for duress pin under device unlock selection
Are you using grapheneOS?
Yep e/OS 3.7.1
E: well I’m a fucking idiot
Eos is not GrapheneOS
E/os isn’t graphene and doesn’t have a duress pin feature.
Lmao, the edited comment
GrapheneOS also has options to turn off USB port so that authorities plugging in devices to try to bypass phone lock can’t be exploited. And user needs to supply password to change the USB options.
sorry accidentally did a duress oopsie uwu bite me
Would love to see how that happened. Extra points if they are the ones that entered it.
They were:
When Tunick provided his passcode and the authorities entered it, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart.”
