The decoy passcode feature should boot into a separate partition that looks like a normal phone setup, and during that time quietly erase the user's actual data. They would never have known if it worked like this.
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.
> perhaps, but what public activity isn't 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.
It's not really comparable. When activists vokuntarily face, and especially when they are in fact, subject to substantial hardship and punishment is when you start changing hearts and minds. Otherwise it's either ignored or generates contempt.
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.
That's not going to stop authoritarians from harassing. Want an example of how this played out?
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.
Trumps DOJ has destroyed credibility with federal judges all ove the country. They’ve had more than one case come back not guilty so far (subway sandwich guy). I’m optimistic they fail to get a guilty verdict here too.
That's positive. I don't live in the USA and I sort of actively avoid news from there. It's good to hear that the federal courts aren't necessarily on Trump's side
Except that's not going to happen because evidence spoliation (legal term) is a crime. And that's what he did. You can say it shouldn't be but it is. This is slam dunk and it happens all the time. It's the same crime as destroying evidence that's been subpoenaed or that it has a preservation hold on it.
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 don't understand how wear leveling makes deniability impossible. You just have to overwrite sectors in the false partition at the same rate as ones in the true partition. Since both the true and false partitions are encrypted, their contents are mathematically indistinguishable from randomness when viewed without the decryption key.
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...
Question on a detail: It's not necessary to have deniability on the fact that you did wipe your device, just on the fact that you did it after you entered the border? Or said differently, if he'd wiped the device before entering the border, it'd be all fine?
(That of course only takes down the "physically impossible" part.)
No recent messages and no recent email would be a pretty big giveaway. It’s a lot of work to make the decoy part of the phone look genuine.
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?
That isn't a crime. It's not a crime to travel across the border with a factory reset phone. That is a fine thing to do and a regular practice for people working in some sensitive areas.
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.
100% I have built similar behavior in my [0] encrypted storage app for iOS. User creates a "duress vault" which is an ordinary vault that user can store any data they want (usually something very inconspicuous). If this vault is opened, it will wipe out all the other vaults silently without actually showing any sign of doing so and still preserving the duress vault's data. Even if snapshot of files is made, the index and keys are gone and can't be recovered.
Cops collaborate with tech corps all the time now. Generational churn means the cops now are not tech illiterate Barney Fife's
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
For exactly the border search scenario, I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs. Imagine booting the phone from a flash drive, making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive, and writing a fresh OS before reaching the border.
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.
It may be fun to fantasize about these things some times, but there is no technical solution to tyranny. Laws are not like code, intent matters. Ultimately if the intent is that the government wants to see your private data, hiding it in any way will be charged - it doesn't matter if you jump through hoops to avoid this specific instance.
This is a half-truth. 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. The USA is somewhere in between.
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.
Unreasonable search is always under attack though. There are many instances today of cops forcibly entering a home claiming nothing more than a welfare check, or "we received a call."
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.)
>There are many instances today of cops forcibly entering a home claiming nothing more than a welfare check, or "we received a call."
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.
I'm personally less concerned with those cases and more concerned with evidence that ultimately is thrown out allowed them to build a case that otherwise would have gone nowhere.
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.
Maybe a better example as a half decent defense attorney, or the judge, could get subsequent evidence thrown out there.
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.
That's not really relevant this was about going to jail after police break the constitution. If we're talking about bad things cops do there's civil asset forfeiture.
Rights needing to occasionally be upheld by the courts wasn't my complaint though. Its cases where rights we're clearly infringed, at least I'd expect most citizens would agree, and courts uphold it because a person didn't say a particular phrase, for example, or because a "reasonable" cop would have seen a cracked door as implied consent.
>There are many instances today of cops forcibly entering a home claiming nothing more than a welfare check, or "we received a call."
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.
> And there are also many instances of [...] those cops being sued, losing qualified immunity, losing their jobs
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".
It isn't foolproof though, and police and DAs have incentive to both work together and to look the other way.
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.
Can you link to some of these cases of cops losing qualified immunity? It's an area in interested in but I understand that to be a vanishingly rare outcome - like only in very egregious cases, not just for run of the mill rights violations.
In case this isn't a bot and simply someone unfamiliar with the internet search, here is a snippet from the Google AI results when searching for the phrase, "list of US court cases where police lost qualified immunity."
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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]
Border search exception lowers the requirements for judicial oversight.
"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."
we're far closer to one side of that spectrum than the other. consider the retroactively legalized mass wiretapping, room 641A, NIST compromises, PRISM, 14 Eyes, the other Snowden revelations, etc
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
Agree with the thrust of your comment, but I had to comment on this:
> 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.
I think I mostly disagree with this. "Technical compliance" is not and should not be the thing that a legal system is designed to incentivize, and should not be the criterion for "perfect rule of law."
I would disagree with you, because "technical compliance" is compliance with the letter of the law. You have complied with every explicit requirement of the law. If the law is insufficient then legislature is free to add a clause that bans whatever aspect you technically comply with that they don't like.
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".
Having good technical tools won't fix a failing society, but they're still nice to have and they make state surveillance of its citizens just a little bit harder. I mean, where would we be without strong cryptography?
This is false. If you can image and wipe your phone on the plane before landing, and write those random bytes to a usb stick, the usb stick will appear blank, because encrypted data is noise. You land with a factory blank phone. You clear customs and get where you are going and restore your phone.
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.
Normally I agree, but making the implementation initially ineffective is a good way to complicate more far reaching measures.
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.
Yes, trying to solve a regulation or legal issue by some technical workaround will never work, you have to fight it at the same level, legally, or system-wise, otherwise, you will be like the person who tries to wash the stairs from the bottom all the way up, it rarely works, you gotta go up to down, collectively go against the matter rather than individually duct taping it for your own specific needs. In that example, it won’t be far fetched the same ones who made it illegal to wipe your phone to make illegal to install xyz OS or using abc protocol, in fact, that’s exactly what they are trying to do under the disguise of “protect the kids” and going after encryption or similar privacy related issues.
They would not be so vehemently against it if it did not work. There is a reason E2EE, duress passwords and similar technologies are under such intense assault these days.
Destruction of evidence as a crime goes back a long, long way. There's no precedent for making it illegal to install some OS or protocol the feds don't like. I don't particularly like what's being done to this guy, but what he did was pretty stupid. You can't be obligated to incriminate yourself but you aren't allowed to destroy evidence.
GrapheneOS has built-in encrypted backup and restore. It backs up the same data transferred by Google's device transfer feature for moving to a new phone which is nearly all app data, the data in the home directory, contacts and a bit more. Certain apps such as Signal encrypt their own data with another layer of encryption using a hardware keystore key. Signal's own backup system needs to be used for that, although it can just be used as a way to get data into the system backup.
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.
> GrapheneOS has built-in encrypted backup and restore.
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.
This has gotten much better fairly recently ime. My backups to WebDAV work most of the time and when it fails I get notifications. But it was quite bad for a long time so I sympathize with your point
> 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.
You added it by copying Blackberry[1]? But seriously how did you think of that feature?
Those "nandroid" backups weren't "close" to that, they were literally that initially. Then, when Android phones started coming with the /sdcard partition mapped to the internal flash memory (a subdirectory of /data) instead of an actual SD card, the /data partition backup mechanism was changed to copy individual files into some sort of archive, but the end result remained the same.
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.
You have to ask yourself why this isn't possible anymore. Similar to how recording calls used to be possible but no longer. I don't know why it is but it is awfully strange that they keep tightening the belt on what we can do with our own devices.
I really really want this for GrapheneOS. The current backup situation is terrible and nowhere near being able to easily image and restore the entire phone (or at least user data).
Not forever though, and if you're an iPhone user, already current iPhones sold in the US are eSIM only. So in some number of years (depenfing on your device oldness tolerance), they will become obsolete eventually.
Can't one just buy some craphone for like $50? with whatever sim.
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.
PinePhone will boot off a microSD before the internal flash, so you could have a clean OS on the card and your real one on the flash. The SD card is under the back cover with the battery and SIM, so chances are they won't think to try to remove it.
I've restored iPhones before, and it does seem pretty simple. Easier than PCs for sure. It's not instant, but the basic configuration is restored pretty quickly while the bulk data restoration happens in the background while you're able to use the phone.
Depends on the app and security setup. If it's using old school Symantec VIP Access, it will not survive a restore. If it is using TOTP from 1Password, it will. Not sure about other options, those are the two I am most familiar with. Thankfully I only have a single app these days relying on VIP Access.
Think for a moment. What is the difference between giving them a password which wipes the phone and giving them a password which opens a blank phone?
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.
> What is the difference between giving them a password which wipes the phone and giving them a password which opens a blank phone?
> 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.
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.
The best technical solution is one code opens to a phone that has things but isn't your actual phone, and then another code that opens to your real phone.
>What is the difference between giving them a password which wipes the phone and giving them a password which opens a blank phone?
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.
Apple makes this very easy. I broke an iPhone and bought a replacement. If you have iCloud, you login to the new phone and you can see which backups you can recover from. If you are transferring a phone, say you upgraded, it’s even easier. You can also image the phone with a connected laptop and store it on a backup drive, which is nice to not use up iCloud limits.
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.
That's mostly time for data sync in the background. It takes 5-10 minutes tops to have the phone working again, but longer to get all of the media and other data restored. Depends on how good your connection is.
I mean, you could ship your real phone to w/e destination ahead of you and bring a $50 burner to the border. If you're a person of interest this won't work because they can monitor you and the destination but if you're a regular schmuck then a burner that never touches your private data or accounts and has a bunch of dummy stuff on it will get you past the border goons.
I already refuse to comply with questioning at the border. Been being harassed and my non-citizen travel companions being SA’d by CBP for decades. Get with the program.
> I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs. Imagine booting the phone from a flash drive, making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive, and writing a fresh OS before reaching the border.
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.
Except apps themselves don't get backed up, only their data. So if you had any apps that are no longer in the app store or that came from outside of it (e.g. TestFlight or development builds), those won't be restored.
I used to play around on projects adjacent to Tor and TailsOS, and had an idea for a setup I was researching. It's a little intense and probably has annoying failure modes, but sharing in case anyone else finds it helpful:
- 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...)
Or keep it in a faraday bag and have the phone wipe if it sees it. If you're ever searched (or otherwise indisposed), they'll open the bag and wipe your phone for you.
Oh hey, I like this variant! So... both the BLE beacon and the phone have a faraday cage, and if they ever appear together outside their cages, the phone wipes?
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...)
I was imagining only the BLE beacon living in one of those little faraday pouches people put their key fobs in. They should be pretty much transparent passing through the x-ray and a pouch with an airtag in it wouldn't raise any suspicion at all at the airport.
Only once you're getting invasively searched would they (ideally) dump the pouch out into the tray with your phone.
When I've gotten secondary screening the first thing they do is take all my belongings and rifle through them on a table. That seems to be standard practice and I'm sure it was step 1 in Tunick's ordeal.
Both approaches have situations they wouldn't work in. If you're extra paranoid you could do both.
> If you're ever searched (or otherwise indisposed), they'll open the bag and wipe your phone for you.
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.
I don't see how. Regardless of how you feel about the lawfulness of the overall situation, Tunick gave an agent false information which resulted in the phone being wiped. That's intent.
This requires no action whatsoever from the phone's owner, you could even be unconscious/dead and it would still work.
I think there's a version of this where you can reasonably say you forgot you'd set this up. Like if they disassemble your whole bag, lay the BLE beacon out, and wipe the phone... You can claim it's a theft deterrent for thieves who might steal your bag and rummage thru it?
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 :)
I like the idea of a phone that automatically wipes itself if I don’t act to stop it. I wonder about the legality of that if the duress code is considered “destroying evidence.”
Ah I recall I used to see the creator around :) thanks for your work!
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
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.
U.S. citizens are going to need obtain a burner phone before returning, and load it with the absolute minimum to load boarding passes, etc., perhaps some reading material or a movie to watch on the plane, and be prepared to share full credentials for thing at the border.
(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.)
I think it's enough to shut down you phone. Then it needs a pin, and you're entitled to not give that over, I believe. So you should be safe, apart from some kind of rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
> So you should be safe, apart from some kind of rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
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.
I've worked with Cellebrite, the industry standard in IT forensics for unlocking and imaging phones. It just runs a series of known exploits. PIN lock, data encryption and regular updates will beat it most of the time.
Before First Unlock with recent hardware and an up to date OS is probably sufficiently infallible for an average person. I wouldn't want to rely on it if I was engaged in espionage, but for someone who won't get the NSA pulled into the case, I'd be pretty confident. This leaked Cellebrite support matrix shows that BFU was secure against them for iPhones that were nearly four years old at the time, and I doubt it's become significantly worse since then: https://ia800405.us.archive.org/32/items/inseyets-offline-uf...
If you don't give a pin, they can seize your devices (Andrew Tate on his 1st visit to Florida said that he refused to give pin and they seized phone and laptop)
They can absolutely keep them. Or they can just "lose" them "accidentally". Who exactly would force them to give them back? Or put another way, who exactly will punish them if they break the law?
They can’t keep them permanently, but unfortunately they have in the past kept them from some people for years, until the hardware was past its useful life. It’s a good idea to only travel with electronics you don’t mind losing (and not just because of this).
You have a worldview that’s incompatible with the reality of the current US legal system where things work the way you believe they should, rather than the way they actually do.
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.
I don’t see how what you said contradicts anything I said, and I suspect you didn’t even read it. Yes, people have before had their devices seized for years, and courts wouldn’t return it sooner. That’s literally what I said.
Honestly, I think this is still fine for most people. The probability of a border agent asking me to unlock my phone is very, very low. The inconvenience of using a burner phone is high.
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.
It's not sad, it's always been the case, and just expanding areas that are implementing it. It seems a lot of people here haven't travelled, or especially haven't travelled to 'restrictive' places in the past.
I've been to Russia, China (about ten times,) central Asian -stans, various parts of South America, Africa, etc. My phones and laptops (plural because I travel with >2/ea, and it looks kind of weird,) have never been inspected.
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.
That seems like a wildly different scenario to me. The OP is about a guy who has not committed any crimes. Andrew Tate is a known predator and CSAM peddler, with an active warrant in several countries.
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.
If you’re a U.S. citizen: CBP cannot deny you entry to the United States merely because you refuse to unlock the phone. If you’re a non-citizen seeking admission: refusal is much riskier.
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.
In theory, yes, but in practice they can do whatever they want, and suing them after the fact is going to be expensive, and have a high probability of not working out for you.
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.
this only applies if they don't refuse to acknowledge your papers as valid and/or they haven't previously put you on some hidden list of people of interest, in which case the instance where you get to prove you're who you say you are will be mediated, like the rest of the (as per the current system) nonpeople, by as many layers of humilliation and risk to your life and health as they can place.
I’ve been asked to hand over my phone when I entered India as a visitor with a valid visa. Yes it was a burner phone. Yes the officer questioned me after seeing only 7 photos in the entire Photos app. It was very obvious that it was a burner phone. I didn’t deceive the officer, instead I just nicely explained why this was a burner phone.
Yep, travelling outside your country of origin, expect that your phone/laptop/ect is subject to search. Anything on you is, it's literally stated. Want to push against that? Sure, makes sense, but just carry a burner phone/device and not worry about it. Literally what the US government recommends when traveling to places like China.
Giving up knowledge (password) is something that is typically scrutinized at the border as well. Had he just handed over the phone and the phone had abilities to self destruct if tampered with (e.g too many incorrect pin entries) -- well the gov's case wouldn't been much harder. If they seized property and accidently destroyed the data, then that's on them.
You are correct, you have to give up the phone but can't be compelled to give up the password, and you'd get it back some indeterminate amount of time later.
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.
I wouldn't really want to deal with the suspicions of having a freshly-wiped phone, or the suspicions of having no phone at all.
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.
leave electronics at home. never take electronics to any airport unless you don't care if everything is read. your only option now.
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.
According to the article, he was actually using GrapheneOS and gave the border official the Duress PIN. So I guess technically it was the official that erased the data :-)
Not how the law works. If I put a bomb in a box. It will explode if a certain pin is put in. And you ask ”can I open the box? What is the pin?” And I say ”here is the pin to open it” and the bomb explodes. Do you think I can claim they blew up themselves ?
My point is even if it hadn't blown up you would've committed a crime anyway, whereas if you rig a phone to erase its own data upon entering a PIN and the PIN is not entered, you haven't committed a crime. The two situations are different enough not to be analogous.
An analogy should not be judged on whether or not it can realistically happen, nor whether it can be manipulated in some way that capitalizes on the differences.
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.
I never told you it is a box with a bomb. You just asked if you can have the pin. You can do another example where you give false information with the intent of making another person take an action that they don’t wanna take and would not take unless you had provided false information. You are causing the action to happen. Just like if you yell fire in a theater. You didn’t stamped anyone to death. But your words caused it.
Or smarter yet, not bare. Looks like a normal phone - innocent-looking vacation photos, innocent-looking social media accounts, innocent-looking email....
I wonder whether it'd be better for a duress PIN to delete existing data and also create a semi plausible artificial profile to hide the deletion event.
I think for the case we're talking about here, though, it would be doable. This doesn't need to thwart deep forensic analysis. It just needs to survive a border agent thumbing through the contents of your phone for a bit. If the fake profile data looks plausible, and doesn't raise any flags, the agent gives the phone back and you're on your way.
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.)
Deleting arbitrary directories, messages and app data would be highly unreliable. There's a high likelihood of the data being recovered. It's not how computer filesystems and storage are designed to work. 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.
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.
> Reliable deletion of data requires setting it up to be reliably deleted later on
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.
I don’t agree. On an encrypted volume all space unallocated by the filesystem should have random data in it and should be indistinguishable from the portion representing in-use filesystem data. Deleting data securely involves overwriting all the previously allocated filesystem blocks with random data. No one should be able to discern that now-empty space had data in it as of some specific recent datetime.
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.
To reliably delete a specific file or directory, it needs to be encrypted with a dedicated key which can be reliably deleted. It can have dedicated key material in the secure element used to derive sub-keys from the main encryption keys or it could simply be encrypted with another layer of encryption.
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.
> I mean - yes? If you design a subtle duress pin that only hides certain things, users would have to choose what.
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.
Maybe it could cause the phone to "randomly" bootloop or something? "Oh no, my phone is broken again, last time this happened I needed to do a factory reset"
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).
> I wonder whether it'd be better for a duress PIN to delete existing data
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.
I mean, it sounds like it would be even better if the duress response was more subtle.
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.
He had an e-reader and phone. My solution would be set the phone's duress pin to the e-reader's actual pin then consent to the e-reader search providing its pin and see what happens.
The actual solution is cloud backup + re-image after the border.
>I don’t think that would fly as a defense in court
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
If it was implemented in such a way, there would be no reason to suspect anyone of using it because it would be totally indistinguishable from not having used it. At that point they have no grounds for legal action. Unless they could monitor FS/disk activity, but that goes beyond typical airport security stuff.
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.
As things stand right now, software is 1-A protected speech. I'm not sure how long that will be the case with growing authoritarianism, specifically wrt to tech, on both sides of the aisle. I am concerned it may be considered probable cause though -- like how you can legally have an ax in the bed of your pickup but it's a free pass for a cop to search your vehicle if they're so inclined -- but really, they can manufacture probable cause for anyone if they want so it's kind of moot. You may be attracting unnecessary attention though if
you've got "GrapheneOS" on your lock screen. But this goes back to my original point, they still have to catch you in the first place.
(1) Keep manufacturer's Android plus some plausible apps and data in a reserved part of the drive. (2) GrapheneOS runs from the other part of the drive. (3) Make sure PIN screen designed to not give away the OS. (4) When duress PIN is entered, erase GrapheneOS and restore manufacturer's Android. (5) Now you won't be charged for having GrapheneOS because they won't know you had it.
No, to my knowledge, they ask you to enter your PIN/password yourself. They don't enter it for you. I believe he entered it himself, at which point the erasure began. The erasure process was witnessed by the officer.
> 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.”
So the real problem in the end is that your duress system should not put a big message "erasing all data" but "loading" slowly and just look mostly empty.
They don't add features that rely on security through obscurity, would give attackers tons of attack surface, is physically impossible to make actually deniable, and could put regular GrapheneOS users in physical danger in authoritarian regimes.
Great link. The most relevant part for me is the last couple minutes (22:00): it's only against the law to destroy evidence if it can be established that such evidence exists. This feels like a more elaborate version of accidentally losing a stack of papers to a gust of wind just as you hand them over.
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!"
If you initiate a wipe before approaching immigration, which swaps the whole phone contents to an encrypted backup that you physically can't decrypt without a key that (say) a friend knows. Then you would be offering immigration the device in an unaltered state between when they request it and when they receive it. Any request for an alternative pass code or whether the pass code given will alter the state of the device can be honestly answered.
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.
This case has a very specific legal framing to it, but border agents don't actually need anything more than suspicion to keep you locked for a day or two.
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.
" If the law is just about intent, you can never defeat it."
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.
I'm not a legal expert, but all this seems to check out with US law. Americans need to remember that some of their constitutional rights don't really apply at ports of entry by design. This inconvenient truth for the land of the free has existed for a long time, this situation is just drawing attention to it. Their powers are far-reaching.
Fun fact, there is a long standing exemption to the unreasonable search and seizure protection laws if you're out on a boat (it may only be on the open ocean and Great Lakes, though IANAL). One of the earliest Supreme Court rulings essentially said that without it, it would be impossible for the US to enforce tariffs, which were the main source of revenue at the time. Anybody who boats often enough has been boarded by the coast guard for various safety checks that allows them to poke around and there's little you can do about it.
Any “navigable waters” fall under this jurisdiction which at a minimum includes all salt water and the Great Lakes, plus a few other odds and ends rivers and so forth. Indeed, almost all state and landside federal law goes out the window on a boat - a frequently bumped into example by boaters here in Washington is getting a civil penalty flavored reminder from USCG that cannabis is still (for whatever reasons) federally an illegal substance, and having it on a boat at all is an offense (with larger amounts or future violations escalating as far as seizure of the vessel).
The US / common law jurisdictions typically only have very light self-incrimination protections. The 5th amendment in the US only protects against self-incriminating testimonial. That's it.
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.
"[...] Since 1953, the US Department of Justice has defined the border to be anywhere within 100 miles of the actual national limits.[...] According to the American Civil Liberties Union, about two-thirds of the people in the US live within 100 miles of a border. So in theory these 200 million border zone dwellers could have their phones seized and searched at any time by CBP agents without a warrant.[...]"
So the part of this that feels like it triggers the government issue here is that in effect you have a locally stored encryption key which gates access to the device, which was removed from the device due to duress password.
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).
> 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 existence of a key only being somewhere other than your current location during a border search enables you to legally say "I cannot unlock this device" and move on with your day.
Well even today this guy could have just said 'I will not unlock this device' and they can seize it for some time, but they can't deny you entry. Which is pretty much the same scenario you created except the guy literally can't unlock it (but that doesn't actually matter here, he never _had_ to unlock it).
> 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.
I'm talking specifically about the graphene OS ability for that approach, not the ability to add an external key to some generalized encryption. The threat model here is that the traveler was required to provide a passcode unlocking a key they had with them on their phone. If that threat is not there, then this bypasses problem.
I always enter US with all of my devices wiped and restore them from backup once I'm past immigration, simply because I don't trust government to maintain the security level my job requires.
Now I'm worried that this will be held against me..
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?
I think you legally are in the US while at an American border crossing - at least if the crossing is on US land, which it was in this case. It might be more complicated for preclearance spots. It's just that normal rights are suspended there despite being in the US, even for citizens. Make of that what you will.
> 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 alleged crime is knowingly interfering with a lawful search (by providing a duress password that deleted the phone). Location has nothing to do with it.
Are you a lawyer? I’m not, but the Legal Eagle video linked elsewhere in this thread says that the reasons for the search are the crux of the “lawful” part, not the location.
(The location was at the port of entry—the border—which is pretty much the definition of the CBP’s jurisdiction.)
It's a fairly shallow point that ignores how laws work.
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.
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.
It doesn’t matter where he was when he deleted the data. He could be in China, it’s still a crime in the us to destroy evidence wanted by American authorities.
Evidence exists independent of a charge or warrant. The instant they asked for access to the phone, it became evidence. If he had entered the duress code himself before walking up to the agent, he'd be fine. Nerds thinking that technicalities is how the law works is why he's in hot water.
> 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?
The US views that US law applies worldwide. There is no requirement that you be anywhere near the US to be under US jurisdiction for an alleged offense against the US, according to the US.
Also, that constitutional protections are suspended within 100 miles of a land, sea, or air border.
4A still doesn't permit you to destroy the evidence. Resist on 4A grounds, destroy the evidence, 4A reasons get overturned - you've got yourself a conviction. US v. Akram Musleh.
in practice you're right, but it's hard to see how that squares with the 4A.
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.
Do you still have a phone number(you can use something like jmp.chat on desktop)? If not, how do you navigate services like banks or utilities that demand one?
It's like those notices "by clicking accept below you agree to giving up your data", by purchasing a ticket to visit US all your data are belong to the US.
I am baffled that the number of comments trying to work around a problem that shouldn't exists is above zero. No, this crap shouldn't happen. It's an appalling situation that it is happening at all.
Seems like it would be better to have a truecrypt type of situation, where if you put in a certain pin, then it just logs you into a separate OS with nothing you want to hide.
Obviously have the duress pin if what’s in your phone is worse than the obstruction charges too.
In the truecrypt scenario you’d be using the hidden and encrypted volume only for what you explicitly want to keep hidden and use the other one for your daily life.
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.
I'd say better would be not trying to pull a fast one on the cops. Rather than trying to sneak past them and local innocuous, just exercise your right to say no.
> 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."
Does anyone know if this border security inspection is a goon scrolling through your photos, or do they just copy the whole memory of your phone to a real “threat detector”.
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.
There are different levels of "search" and the law (as interpreted by the courts) is not currently fully settled. The LegalEagle YouTube video on this case is excellent, as always:
"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."
But the bar for hauling someone to court and defacto punishing them financially and smearing them in the eyes of the public is so low. And the path to getting compensation for wrongful prosecution so fraught. What an easy tool the justice system is to punish uppity citizens thinking they don't have a king.
You think they'll see a courtroom? Ha! If they're lucky they'll get there in 5yr and $15k.
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.
I'm not sure this is 100% true. Courts have found that in order for the exception to the 4th amendment at borders to apply the search has to bear some relationship to the purpose of securing borders. For example
"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"
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.
If you are a US citizen, they are not entitled to your unlocked phone. They need a judicial warrant if they want you to unlock your phone with a PIN/password. It is settled case law that that falls under your protections under the 14th Amendment.
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.
It seems like the best course of action would be to argue he did not destroy evidence, just made it unavailable at the location to force the requirement for a search warrant. It would probably be a hard sell, but I can't think of a better argument (not a lawyer).
What's the longest a citizen (with all appopriate documentation on them) has been held by border patrol after refusing to answer any questions? A quick search failed to get me a solid answer to this, other than a general suggestion that 72 hours is probably the practical upper limit (but no statutory limit necessarily exists), and CBP policies say 12 hours.
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.
Problem is, he didn't destroy shit. "He" (by which I mean, technically the agents) deleted a header that's used to encrypt data but can restored from a backup.
This is why we have judges, I wonder if this has been ruled on already. If you filled out a notebook in a special cipher with the cipher stored separately beside it, then when a cop asked for the notebook you handed the cipher over and then burned the cipher right in front of them, is that destruction of evidence? Idk at the end of the day it does have the same result as destroying the data.
>"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.
Sure, but the issue is he didn't delete his data, he deleted a header with a key in it, that's it, just a few MB. He didn't delete hundreds of GB of chats or browsing history, he deleted a key to access it and that key isn't necessarily the only one that can access it. All the stuff they want can still be accessed just fine if another copy of the key exists.
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.
Kind of? Let's say he has a detached header on another device and deleted the one on his phone. It's not at all destroyed now. Is what he did still illegal?
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.
I think I misunderstood your original scenario. This one makes a lot more sense. Although I wouldn't want to be in the position of being the test case.
Evidence of what? Destroying evidence assumes he is guilty of a crime which there be evidence of. Our system is predicated on an assumption of innocence. The normal threshold to accuse is a "reasonable, articulable suspicion." This does not meet that criteria.
Well that's the thing with destroying evidence. If you destroyed it, it becomes harder (or impossible) to prove you did the crime. That's why it's not uncommon for people to be only charged with stuff like "obstruction of justice" rather than the actual crime they allegedly did.
In this case, the authorities are claiming they were looking for CSAM. So wiping the phone hindered a valid investigation.
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.
And what if he was erasing a steamy affair with a border patrol agent? That's not illegal, but releasing knowledge of it could be damaging to all parties for no reason.
if the only evidence of a crime is on your phone, what kind of crime is it?
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?
Destroying evidence or items believed to be evidence is a crime in itself, regardless of whether or not the original "evidence" or lack thereof pertains to a crime.
They were pretty obviously hoping to find a specific crime to accuse him of (because he is a protester against the Atlanta "Cop City" thing).
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).
I'm just guessing here, but the most problematic word on the 4th amendment to attack from the government's perspective is "unreasonable". It's easy to see how a phone border search could be construed as reasonable, and (without digging into this deeply) I suspect that's where most of the push back on this will be.
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.
> It's easy to see how a phone border search could be construed as reasonable
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?
There is no such exception allowed in the Constitution. And if a case is made that they're not legally in the US yet, then by the same logic, they should not be subject to all the same laws of the US yet.
The Supreme Court has long recognized a border-search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. In United States v. Flores-Montano, the Court looked to the nation’s sovereign “interest in protecting . . . its territorial integrity” to justify such searches.3 In United States v. Montoya de Hernandez, the Court stated, somewhat more narrowly, that Congress is the source of the executive’s power. It explained that “[s]ince the founding of our Republic . . . [Congress has] granted the Executive plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border, without probable cause or a warrant.” The Commerce Clause permits Congress to authorize the seizure of goods at the border.
> 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 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.
> A wiped phone can't contain contraband, so wiping the phone serves the same purpose as a search.
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?
I see a vast gulf between searching a truck of produce driven by a non-citizen vs intercepting a citizen at the boarder with known affiliations with the opposing political party.
And it's impossible to ignore that context. This is plainly wrong. And people trying to justify this plainly fascist search is sickening.
Even Wikipedia spells out that invasive searches require "reasonable suspicion." So we return to the core question... suspicion of what? Suspicion is not a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
"The government is allowed to use scanning devices and to search personal electronics. Invasive bodily searches, however, require reasonable suspicion." is what the article says
The original text is basically useless. They're more like a mission statement rather than directives. They set up broad aspirations, but the implementation has to be aggregated over literally millions of pages of judicial decisions.
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.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but the Constitution binds the government, not citizens. The government can damn well afford to know what the 4th and 5th Amendments mean.
The words are actually extremely clear and its exceptionally prudent to quote them, because nobody with a brain can read them and fail see that the government is simply being unconstitutional - all over the place. Even when the people are powerless, we dont have to give up our powers of seeing the truth. Your post and this whole idea that "the words dont mean what they say they mean" is frankly doublespeak of the lowest form.
> we dont have to give up our powers of seeing the truth
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.
When its "interpreted" in a way that directly contradicts the words themselves then its not an interpretation, its a smokescreen to try and cover up the fact people in power dont want to follow the constitution and are not planning on doing so.
> 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.
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.
The naivete of some of the comments here is astounding. It doesn't matter whether you're right, it doesn't matter whether it's the law, it's irrelevant that you have rights, etc. Those things are of the past now, for the US.
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.
With all due respect, this is a wild take. Things aren't great in the U.S. right now, but they're not even in the same universe as what the Stasi was doing.
> 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 US being the 'free-st' place on earth at anytime is quite the misnomer. Sure, you can be 'free' if you are white, wealthy, oh and land owning. Tale as old as time. Sure, you can protest, but many many other countries have far surpassed the US on that one, and have been doing it a whole lot longer.
As a successful nonwhite person in the US, AbsurdCensor made an infantilizing comment. Non white people have flocked here in droves because of the freedom afforded to anyone to become wealthy. I agree that we are back sliding (tax burden, regulatory burden, political repression, etc.) but it is absurd to make it about race and say that it wasn't once the freest place to start a business and even express yourself.
Then why are so many non-white, non-Christians still flocking here? Why would anyone want to come to this country if it's such a hellhole?
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.
You are arguing the slippery slope, which may play out or may not. Instead, argue today, with the facts as they are not as you imagine they will be at some future point.
its only with the benefit of hindsight (and being on the winning side- thus the propaganda was never dispelled) that we consider the stasi and so on the way we do.
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.
> 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.
"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/....
Definitely it can always be worse and I think we need to break ridiculous laws. I know nothing about Mark Bray but that is a ridiculous thing that should adjudicated.
Yeah, I wrote about this on HN before. Americans tend to imagine that WW2 ends and then East Germany immediately puts up a wall and now nobody can leave but it was way more gradual than that. The year the European war ended you could just walk across the border, you'd need to show some ID but you have ID because it was the war and Germans issued everybody with ID in the war. The Allies are manning the borders, they want to arrest Nazis, so ID saying you're a Nazi is a bad idea, but if you're just some farmer from outside Leipzig (so East Germany) you can easily cross. More than a Million people flee West. Are they foolish? You already know the answer.
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.
I sometimes wonder what the tipping point is for people, or whether there actually is one for many.
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.
Be that as it may, observe that the directions are opposite.
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 others point out, in the DDR one could not LEAVE. The main reason we have to have large sweeps for people coming here illegally is because administrations other than Obama and Trump turned a blind eye and did little enforcement. The Biden admin went to far as being negligent in their enforcement, so now there is a lot of backlog.
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.
What country does not have immigration laws? We’re not unique in having them nor in enforcing them. Check out Taiwan, China, Singapore, Japan, Egypt, South Africa, Chile, Peru, Canada, etc.
Well, if previous presidencies hadn’t been derelict in their duties (e-verify, timely removals, ineligibility to benefits etc) we would not have been in this pickle. But, especially the Biden admin they _removed_ existing barriers, worked with NGOs to up the numbers of migrants arriving, many ending up illegal, means that there is a large backlog that normally would not need those measures had previous admins not been derelict. In the last 30 years only Obama and Trump enforced immigration laws.
I prefer the Japanese way and the Swiss way. Their citizens come first, foreigners come second. The needs of citizens come before the need for cheap labor. Every job is a decent job. No job is so bad that they can only get illegals to do them.
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).
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.
But I consider what the US/UK are doing to be invasive, and if the governments fell I might be proven right (hell, Snowden already proved it over a decade ago- yet here we are).
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.
"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."
You might not realise it, but you're proving my point to some extent.
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.
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".
We blame the Soviet government for famine, but that’s not necessarily the opinion of people living at the time. Famine tended to occur every ~10 years due to natural weather variability so while 1930-1933 was unusually brutal it was just one of a very long string of famine. For example the Russian famine of 1921–1922 killed 5 million from a drought + WWI. Which was preceded by the famine of 1906-1908 which was preceded by the famine of 1901–1902, though these where less significant.
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.
> With all due respect, this is a wild take. Things aren't great in the U.S. right now, but they're not even in the same universe as what the Stasi was doing.
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.
Winning arguments and solving problems are two different skillsets. And the US Congress is mostly people with the former. Not to say that winning arguments doesn't help when choosing a solution, but it is very different.
Or “To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
> but they're not even in the same universe as what the Stasi was doing
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.
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?
If we're trying to find a difference in distinction, that has never been the case in the US. The police I've always been able to surveil and put people in jail.
The very big difference to the Stasi is, people back then were really afraid to speak their mind, as there were real consequences fast, for doing things as stating your opinion about ghe government. And not creating attention while saying, I cannot speak up anymore! while speaking up all the time.
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.
On the other hand, they had on average someone in every appartment block and every company directly reporting to them and doing on request other things. The human touch of spycraft.
Nowdays spying on the population is automated.
You're right that the US is not in the same universe as the Stasi was.
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
> 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.
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.
It just takes a bit of reading about American history to know that we have had authoritarian phases pretty much since our independence. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson policies against freedom of speech, native Americans and international trade, Fillmore and Buchanan fugitive slave act and Dred Scott, Lincoln suspension of Habeas Corpus, Cleveland using the military against unions, Johnson military expansion in Vietnam, Nixon secret bombings and using CIA/FBI against protesters. The nation was heavily polarized during each of these periods as much or more than it is today.
Interesting you say that, because as another Canadian, I would say that the sentiment in our country is the opposite of you describe. The actions of our government reflect it.
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?
The simple answer is we need constitutional reform. Term limits on SCOTUS, codification of norms (eg releasing presidential candidate tax returns, not blocking appointee confirmations indefinitely to steal the position for the next admin), anti corruption laws with teeth. Also things like reigning in the absurd executive power bloat that’s gone on since Lincoln. POTUS was never meant to be a king. There should never be a case where the executive can start a war (conventional, trade or otherwise) without even CONSULTING Congress.
This is all just reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
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.
No. That might be what our current leaders deserve, but it won't fix the problem of grossly dysfunctional governance, particularly at the highest levels. Which makes it just a dangerous (to everyone) waste of effort. (And I do not mean just the current government. The whole kit & kaboodle, going back decades, has comprehensively failed.)
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.
If being an insurrectionist and convicted felon and neck-deep in the Epstein ring wasn't enough to sink the guy, I don't think anyone who voted for him (or anyone who for good or bad reason, abstained) would give a single flying fuck about his tax returns.
What matters is the taxi, not the checkers. Stuff like tax returns is window dressing.
America dominance on the world is ending, it's a fact. East Asia is at least on par, India is china from 25 years ago.
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.
Moving on from being a unipolar power does not necessitate societal collapse. The UK is still around and their empire fell a long time ago.
> 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.
> This nonsense needs to stop. You can’t vote for him again unless he deigns to run for a lower office
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.
His cognitive decline is increasingly evident, his approval rating is the lowest on record (for any president), he ran again last time because it was his best chance to stay out of jail. If he wants a peaceful dotage and doesn't want his legacy torn down, he's better to endorse Don Jr or Marco Rubio and rig the election at the margins if need be.
You keep saying it and it’ll happen. Stop saying it. You give credence to the idea by speaking it into existence. Stop believing and repeating their bullshit and letting them win.
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.
Yes and I caused Jan 6 by calling out my local Rep. in December 2025 for telling his constituents to storm the Capitol and steal back the election. What compromise on this issue are you looking for?
> The UK is still around and their empire fell a long time ago.
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.
American imperialism is well documented. We have military outposts all over the world. Puerto Rico is still in essence a colony.
> 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.
good grief. people said this about the USSR right up until it collapsed. they also said it about Japan. this website is ridiculous. you people know this is an echo chamber, right? go outside
Your day to day is still pretty much normal. If you turned off the news and never read about Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data [1] you'd just in your head remember there are tens of millions of folks flying, going through customs and border security and all that with 0 issues. What you wrote I think regarding the decade of silliness precisely supports the point, in my opinion.
[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.
You have no real rights when police can kill, maim, or otherwise fuck you up with impunity even when you have done nothing wrong. Philando Castile and others demonstrate this. You may win in court but your life can be fucked up if the police decide to inflict non judicial punishment.
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.
> You have no real rights when police can kill, maim, or otherwise fuck you up with impunity even when you have done nothing wrong.
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?
That doesn’t mean you have rights. It just means you haven’t yet been targeted.
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.
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.
> As far as federal overreach of power goes, that's pretty inexcusable.
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.
> 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.
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.
> When a house is raided and someone flushes a toilet, can courts assume they flushed drugs, or does that have to be proven?
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.
> then destruction of evidence would be functionally permissible whenever done competently.
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.
> 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.
So it turns out destroying a record to obstruct an investigation is also a crime under 18 U.S. Code § 1519. For that they wouldn't need to prove that it was "evidence" or even that it was relevant.
So as much as I sympathize with the guy a d wabt to cheer him on, he's probably screwed.
I'd generally agree that the police shouldn't be able to lie to a detained suspect, or at least that such deception should be more constrained than it is in the context but, in general, the law as practiced hinges on the question, "does police deception render a detained suspect's confession or statements involuntary?"
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
I disagree. Back then it was all a big secret. Officially the US was pretending.
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.
Despite the normalization of masked federal gunmen kidnapping people based on the color of their skin and the language they speak.... Not even breaking a law in the process, the supreme court legalized racial profiling.
One can just argue about the normalization of people breaking the law by overstaying visas or hopping the border or whatever being the Supreme Court (or whoever you feel like blaming) legalized some other concept that most Americans also find disagreeable.
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.
… 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."
> This illegal shit going on doesn’t affect more than 49.999% of the population so… no big deal.
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.
You are the one who said “doesn’t affect most people”.
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.
> You are the one who said “doesn’t affect most people”.
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.
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.
Normal day of a normal person living in dictatorship ... is normal. There are sometimes periods where a lot of people are at risk at the same time, but they pass.
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.
Well, all might be fine, you might be a little obedient drone, not angering your masters, making sure to be apolitical - only to be mobilized & send to die in a ditch in a useless war.
"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!"
Counter point is, throughout history America didn’t have a competition that surpassed it across many standards. Japan got very close, but got contained in some ways. China doesn’t need to play ball.
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 fully expect a new president to be ushered in, whether R or D, and for some level of normalcy to start creeping back.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, mostly agree but playing devils advocate, PRISM was authorized under bush, implemented under Obama, and is being abused by Trump. Obama promised safeguards, but it’s pretty clear those were just a ruse. It’s only going to get worse. The well deserved controversy around Flock is the perfect example.
“Silliness” I have masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles barking orders at US citizens in my neighborhood and zip-tying minors who did nothing but run away and cry. I have neighbors cheering it on. Not silly at all when you see it up close.
If they are masked men in unmarked vehicles, how do you know they’re federal agents? Aren’t they just criminals that you should call the police to stop?
And you have the Attorney General of the United States, and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security saying "it doesn't matter, if they tell you they're federal agents, you need to comply."
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.
I agree. It's actually quite insulting to other countries whose actual atrocities were measured in lives lost. I voted for Kamala but Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. He's just a loser, he's not even remotely brave enough to be Hitler Jr.
The guy doesn't have the stomach for real totalitarianism. Just populism, corruption, and weakening the country.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is just another word for "describing Trump actions in honest realistic terms rather then whitewashing them".
And considering how right talks about Mandani, Biden, Harris ... it is ridiculous that the derogatory term goes only toward ... people who talk about Trump.
The USA started from and has come back from way worse in the past.
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.
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.
You can make a credible argument that the American society is less free, less equal, and less equitable than it was at its founding?
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.
I don’t think any reasonable person would think I am claiming that every ‘tick’ makes things better along every possible axis for every possible person. It’s pretty obvious that judging whether America’s ‘ticks’ have been towards ‘a freer, more equal, and more equitable society’ means considering the state of society in aggregate.
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.
Your line of argumentation asserts that freedom has increased over time with allowances for any form of subjugation by the government short of enslavement. I don't doubt that you're making a good faith argument, but it doesn't engage with the real problem of abuse of power and disenfranchisement of the people because no matter how bad it gets for the average citizen it will never be as bad as chattel slavery. It's hard to argue in good faith on a nuanced issue with someone who has a one liner mic drop response to everything.
Do you honestly think that our society was more (or as) equal 200 years ago than it is today?
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.
Prior to the enclosure period of English common law, land was assumed to be available to the private use of government subjects. The American West was the same before it was swallowed by the US government. The current situation is provably less free along this dimension. You could argue that this is not important relative to other things (this is a value judgement), or that things done outside of the state are outside of the discussion (this is a a fallacy, a lot of things once outside of the state find themselves inside it today), or you could say that this does not account for intra-community conflict between settlers and natives (this is a straw man)
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)?
And to add to that, a very loyal set of voters who will literally vote for more of the same even when it directly and empirically makes their lives worse.
We have unprecedented corruption in the White House but much of the other stuff is not new territory. It’s bad and a regression I hate to see. But we can always improve when the people demand better. The people always have the power, even if they don’t realize it.
I remain hopeful that we will react to this latest test by improving the guardrails again. The current regime does not by any means have the popular support of the citizenry, so there is every reason to expect some backlash and consequences on the other end of this. It'll take years, though, to work through.
> US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era
> 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.
Quite possibly the worst take I’ve ever read on hacker news. “Things are generally bad now so the entire country should roll over and get fucked.” What are you even thinking dude? Maybe take a walk outside or something..
This has been legal since long before Trump, if you don't like it there's laws in motion to ban it you can support, but entering across a border you've been allowed to be searched without a warrant for decades at least. And if you're being searched and then you destroy what they're trying to search... Here you are.
“ 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.
Border control can't stop you from entering the country. Please do not spread misinformation.
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.
The tendency to describe things that are so essentially characteristic of the capitalist imperial core as resembling the Soviet Union is always so funny
The US has it's mid-term elections this november, and it's possible, and even likely, that the Democratic candidates will win overwhealmingly. The Democrats are not a monolith, either, the Democratic Socialists of America political group is the very progressive part of the Democratic party, they are the ones that are not accepting dark money campaign donations. I do not agree with a lot of the unrealistic things that some DSA candidates have said, but those or the candidates that aren't winning the primaries. There is a giant blue tidal wave coming in November. Trump will become nothing more than a lame duck "president", and he'll likely be impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate and the Justice System will probably be the final arbiter of his fate. That's the way I see it. And I never believed I would be saying what I just said, but the fact is that since trump was elected, the democrats have flipped 31 (at last count) formorly Republican held seats, and the republicans have flipped exactly zero seats from democrat to republican. The American People are not their goverment, especially right now, even though that's not how it was meant to be, but I know one thing, they are fed up and enough is enough.
People have no idea. They’re destroying old books. Just like the last time (1), and the time before that (2), and the time before that(3), which were:
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.
I think the best case scenario is that the democrats win sufficient control of congress that they can both stop the legislative agenda (to the extent it even exists) and interfere enough with presidential executive actions that everything stalls until we reach the next presidential election.
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.
> I have exactly zero expectations of real consequences to Trump. He has far too much popular support for that to be realistic.
That's the problem. He has wide support despite gestures around. The thing a latge part of the population supports is _this_. It's not going away. This is the reason that people are bearish on US future.
In law school we skipped border search cases because the border crosser cases can basically be summed up with “you have no right to privacy at the border.” This has been the common law for 5000 years. It has nothing to do with Trump, or cell phones, or anything other than the notion that a sovereign has an absolute right to know what is crossing its borders.
Not OP but generally states are considered to be a central political organization that maintains a monopoly on violence within a defined area.
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.
It's been this way in the UK for years now. Always interesting to hear how far the rest of the West the US is.
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.
> I'm so very sorry, but the best you can do from here is speedrun the collapse.
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.
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.
Tens of millions have voted for this 3 times in the past 10 years, it succeeded twice. This is not going away, half the voting population of the US wants to live under authoritarian rule and will do anything to take the whole country with them.
Republicans are in every way trying to turn this into an authoritarian hellhole. "Cruelty is the point" is a phrase used with regards to right-wing politics in America. We're heading in the worst direction possible, but it takes a bit longer and more work to get a country the size of America with different states to become fully authoritarian. It doesn't happen overnight like it can in small countries.
Voter preferences can change with time, as voters observe the effects of their previous selections. Most voters don't want and didn't vote for authoritarian rule. They are humans with many diverse challenges & concerns in their lives. Their votes are an attempt to balance/compromise among those.
Only a small part, maybe 1/3 of the US wanted this. Not the whole population. Sadly 1/3 of eligible voters don't vote - they are the ones who didn't want this but don't have enough sense to vote, and that's different than wanting trump.
Voters change their mind all the time. Sure, there are still plenty in the US who want all this, but Trump's approval ratings are at or near all-time lows, and at least some people who voted for him finally see his lies for what they are, and have regrets.
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.
I take some solace for how there is such a hard floor of support for Trump. Counterintuitively, I consider that good news. Because any regular politician would be so far underwater at this point that they might well fear for their life. What Trump has is a solid 1/3 of the population that are so far up his ass they can't see daylight. That works out great for him, and poorly for every other GOP politician. He's achieved demagogue status, which is easier said than done. Vance ain't got it, Rubio ain't got it, there's not really anybody on the sidelines who looks like they may have it either. So when Trump is gone, the GOP is going to undergo another wild gyration in ideology after the infighting settles down. And if they don't find another halfway plausible demagogue, they might be a back into minority party status for the next two decades. There is precedent for this.
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.
You can rage against Trump and republicans as much as you want but in the end the democrats must learn to formulate why anybody should vote FOR them. Even in the current chaos they aren’t able to bring up a coherent message and follow through when they are in power. I see the same in Germany. AfD is getting stronger while the established parties get nothing done.
It reminds me somewhat of the state of the Weimar Republic. The democratic parties failed which gave an opening to the nazis.
Somehow, no one votes for nazi because they believe that stuff. Rhetorically. They are always victims with no agency.
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.
The Democratic party started, fought, and lost a culture war almost before Republicans even responded. They alienated their voters. Heritage Foundation didn't need to do anything. And fringe groups got more ammo.
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.
>half the voting population of the US wants to live under authoritarian rule
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.
Does anyone on the other side have a credible plan to undo the damage?
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?
That's the thing that worries me. The Democratic party just doesn't have their shit together in that way. They absolutely should be developing this sort of plan. I expect there is some plan, but I doubt it's as comprehensive or in-depth as Project 2025. And it needs to be.
On a long enough timeline, nothing is permanent. The question is how long it lasts and how bad it gets before it gets better.
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.
The people want this administration and their right-wing politics gone, and the right-wing knows it - if the people really wanted the current shitstorm to continue the right-wing wouldn't be so desperate to suppress the vote, gerrymander like madmen, and use every questionable lever to prevent people to vote like trying to extinguish all mail-in voting, etc.
I'm sure a big group of people want that, but I wouldn't call it "the people" when the president has a ~38% approval rating. That's low enough to lose an election but still way too high for me to be comfortable with it. And "the people" have extremely short memories, as we saw last time around.
> 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.
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?
You don't need to go to other countries to play your fears, lest we forget our constitution is a pro-slavery document and one of the first acts of congress was the fugitive slave laws.
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.
Not to sound like a contrarian, but no. They would have thrown it in a faraday bag, cloned the device, and then would use one of the many existing forensic tools available to crack the pin.
That's crazy. Here in the UK border police can question you for any reason (no need for suspicion) and if you refuse to answer questions or give them access to your devices you'll be charged under terror legalisation.
The charges are the punishment. You are imprisoned, risk losing your career, risk losing reputation, and still have to hire a lawyer. The costs are incredibly asymmetric. This leads to the majority of people complying, which only emboldens the state.
How did it end up, because it’s not a new thing to happen. First time I read about this guy’s border crossing case was few months ago and was of course very much highlighted for the level of surveillance govs can do.. but I also read some
Time later that by the letter of law he was not proven wrongdoing.
Are we still discussing a border crossing case that is long historic or there is still an active drama for this guy going on?
I don't know about you, but don't people use encryption to retain privacy? And are people still free to manage their personal information? Doesn't a duress PIN present that information in its intended form? I'm confused.
99% of ppl would not hesitate than risk detainment
> 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
99% of people also have an email service that will turn over your entire inbox if required by law.
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.
you really have to go out of your way to figure out how to install graphene and on top of that you have duress code and its pretty much painting a red target on yourself across borders
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.
Well wiping isn't just cause for suspicion, it's actually destroying evidence. He was charged with that, but they couldn't charge him with domestic terrorism. He also had the option to decline unlocking the phone.
The difference is that this guy gave a code that wiped the device while it was under investigation. That's obstruction.
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.
i think it's just that the American population is the last bunch who gives a damn about it, and the pockets of resistance still makes the news... the same happens mostly everywhere else, just without much complaints.
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).
Since there are zero devices that are released that don’t indicate recording, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to outlaw modification of recording equipment to hide recording.
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.
Technology is becoming too significant an existential threat to all governments. IMO, this is the "animal lashing out when backed into a corner" stage of their arc. All of the bills are coming due and they're having to answer for them.
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.
> Technology is becoming too significant an existential threat to all governments. IMO, this is the "animal lashing out when backed into a corner" stage of their arc. All of the bills are coming due and they're having to answer for them.
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.
You're not being ignorant; it's a pretty abstract line of reasoning, I'll admit.
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."
I know surveillance is on par in the UK, but is the UK also building and populating massive detention centers where people are kept without due process*? Are they flooding the streets of liberal cities with soldiers*? Killing citizens on the streets of liberal states (Minnesota) out in the open? Has nationalism completely overtaken the government and citizenship? Has the opposition party been completely neutered? Does your leader openly break any laws of their choosing while plundering national coffers?
Law enforcement are underpaid, overworked, and they aren't even respected anymore. A lot are fine, but a lot of people are ending up there because they can't get any other job [1]. I don't think these attacks on freedom are always malicious, I think a lot of it is people in law enforcement who aren't capable of understanding the not-so-subtle difference between "law enforcement" and "law authority".
[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.
So far as I can tell --- and someone challenged me on this recently, saying they'd been in court over a case related to it, so take this with a small grain of salt --- this "too high IQ" thing happened once, in New London CT, and if that's really the only documented case you have to wonder whether it wasn't just New London making an excuse for why they didn't hire someone they just didn't like the vibes of. I can say with assurance that there's no "IQ cap" in cop hiring around here; there's a standardized assessment, and there's no score cap on it.
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.
This is a bit worse than that. They're specifically targeting this guy because they don't like his politics, an act that is unconstitutional, but Trump and his administration has had contempt for the constitution since day one.
Republicans might as well rename their party the Democratic Fascists of America at this point.
> Republicans might as well rename their party the Democratic Fascists of America at this point.
I'm reading Stefan Zweig right now, he was a prolific Jewish author from 1890s until his suicide in 1942, living as an exiled Jew from Austria in South America. He has written many words, over a century ago, that would support your claim.
Next they'll be demanding the passwords to your dropbox and onedrive, because you "might have uploaded something from your phone before re-entering the country". Bet on it.
What about none citizens? Customs kicks you out or throws you into a camp first.
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.
That has been the case for a long while. I used to travel a lot for work - Serbia, Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, Australia, NZ, Qatar, Kuwait, Moldova - but the only unpleasantness I received at a border/intl airport was on landing in the US, twice; NY both times. Talk about rude and aggressive, for no reason at all. I'm from the UK, by the way.
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."
I always bring two phones when I travel, sometimes more than two, mostly because I’m a mobile engineer so I need devices to test apps on, but also just in case of situation like this.
What I don't understand is if he just didn't give any password, he would have been fine. It's only because he gave him a duress pin that he's in trouble.
So, in both cases the government wouldn't have access to the contents of the phone
They might have a way to gain access anyway. That was that case where the FBI got the locked iPhone 5C of a San Bernardino shooter suspect. Apple refused to unlock it, so the FBI paid a hacking firm to do it. If there's no known vuln to get into a phone today, I wonder if they'd hold onto it in hopes that one shows up later.
18 months is, by precedent, the limit on contempt for refusal to decrypt[0], but this administration is happy to disregard any precedent that does not agree with them.
Actually no, they are required to allow you to enter the country, but they will make it a hassle, to the point of dehydrating you and/or refusing bathroom access, and confiscate the device in the end and access is through other technical means.
> 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
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.
We can only hope that it eventually gets decided that there can be no such thing as destroying evidence before a judge has initiated the discovery phase of a proceeding, outside of any standing operational requirements like business records.
Would it be permissible to wipe your phone before going through customs to get back into the US? If they ask to search your already wiped phone, you aren’t destroying any evidence.
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.
I wouldn't assume that to be the case. It's illegal under federal law to destroy evidence of a crime. Just what the government needs to do to show that you've destroyed evidence of a crime and not just the sexting you did with your girlfriend is a pretty murky area of law, from what I can tell.
I would not present a phone to customs that had clearly just been wiped.
You're speaking nonsense since there was no charge or warrant against him. There was no crime that was committed. People are free to use their phone for f sake. People who reason as poorly as you will lead to all remaining rights being lost.
The way he wiped it is legal for the same reason. It was an illegal search and he was under no obligation to preserve the data on his phone.
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.
You're losing track of the discussion which was about erasing data before arriving at the counter. In any event, if you're so willing to "bend over" to the man, please try not to take others down with you.
I did not, in fact, lose track of that point. I was merely pointing out it's not a solution. I'm sure the guy in the topic article thought he had things figured out, too.
You know how they say ignorance of the law is no excuse? That holds true even if the law seems unreasonable or incomprehensible.
What about everyone does this at the border. Then what is normalized is deleting your encryption key while entering, they won’t prosecute everyone on their baseless prosecutions. Join in I say, there is no law being broken only scare tactics being applied to prevent this kind of thing. Normalize the act not the consequences.
So we're presumed guilty until proven otherwise (the presumption is, any data we delete must be illegal; couldn't possibly be nude selfies that the government has no right to see)
Paywalled, but what is the actual charge? Is it some extremely generic "obstructing an investigation" one? The US is quite good about making court documents available on line, if someone can find it.
"In May 2022 the corporate offices of Brasfield & Gorrie in Birmingham, Alabama were vandalized, and the message "Drop Cop City Or Else" was spray-painted on the building."
"On March 5, 2023, dozens of people attacked the Cop City construction site with rocks and firebombs, destroying construction equipment."
Knowingly providing a PIN that would erase evidence is going to get tough in court.
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.
There is no duty to keep a copy of messages and private data on your phone for the FBI to peruse at its leisure. Quite the opposite, actually (according to the constitution).
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.
Whatever they claimed they needed access for his phone to. Probably nothing serious that would be worth more than a fine, if anything. But now they've got him for deleting evidence, which is pretty bad.
There is no "evidence"; by any reasonable interpretation of that word there would have to be an actual accusation of crime for there to be evidence of one. This was a search predicated on literally no actual basis apart from "we have the right to search your device because we have ultimate power at border passings", essentially just a fishing expedition.
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".
That shouldn't be too hard. Get someone from Google or someone with any tech knowledge to explain to the judge how phones normally work, what encryption keys are, the implications of wiping an encryption key, and then get someone to show the difference between entering a normal PIN wrong several times and entering the duress PIN. You just need to convince the jury (or judge, if there is no jury for whatever reason).
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.
Sure buddy. And the uncertainty principle means you can't prove I was at the scene of the crime.
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.
No, it means there is no general solution to the problem of proving software correct. You can prove if a specific program will halt or not given certain parameters. You cannot write an algorithm that will work to prove if any arbitrary program will halt.
> They were going to catch him for something, some day. This incident just provided the necessary excuse to lock him up
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 ...
China is strictly worse than the USA when it comes to border controls. That doesn't mean the USA is good or acceptable in any way; these laws are part of the reason why I don't plan on visiting the country. The USA also has much worse laws on the books, like having to give the authorities your social media passwords to check if you're secretly a terrorist (though that doesn't apply to citizens).
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".
China is indeed "bad" for the gestapo shit. The difference is that China's gestapo shit comes with benefits for the common man too, whereas in the US the gestapo shit only serves the inner circle at the top of the regime with zero benefits to 99% of the populace.
Ok those who see no problem... Let's just for the sake of argument concede that you have never had any right to privacy while crossing the border and so there is no cause for outrage here. Guy did it to himself.
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.
Anyone that is surprised by this or somehow thinks this is new clearly hasn't crossed the border a whole lot. I grew up in a city along the US/Canada border. You don't fuck around with US Customs (or Canadian) agents. My cousin (not always so friendly) pissed off a US Customs agent (in the 90s mind you) and they promptly took his car and disassembled much of it looking for non-existent drugs. When they put it back together it was never the same. Their job is to be suspicious, 99.999% of the time people are completely innocent. But let 1 bad person through and it's Customs' fault for whatever bad thing they do. Not an easy job. Not an excuse for how they can misbehave either.
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.
I left this comment 2 weeks ago on a youtube short on the subject:
"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.
Isn't that an illegal law though? After all you are not required to aid in the prosecution against yourself, aka you don't have to incriminate yourself. So such a law means that the courts now ignore that law/amendment. Doesn't this make it illegal on this point alone?
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.
> Oh, they may well give you bad time if your phone looks like a burner with too little content.
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.
This is not... advice. But if anyone's actually going to do this, the method that's worked for me...
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.
So what, don’t do anything to protect yourself because there’s no hope? Give up?
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.
And yet this distant possibility doesn’t seem to happen very often to citizens, as long as we still have courts. Not that actual abuses should be trivialized.
This comes across as fearmongering to keep people from protecting themselves.
That isn’t true. They can detain you briefly for questioning at the border, but if there is no crime then you will be released. Feel free to dig into historical court cases about border detention if you disagree.
If you get charged with a crime, things are very different.
Nope, no disagreement. I just see your take as very optimistic.
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.
If the abuse is egregious, you have a decent chance of pro bono representation or a lawsuit payout. In any case, activism comes with personal risk, and part of activism is accepting that risk while attempting to protect others. (This person was an activist, and it’s likely that they wanted to confine the damage to themselves.)
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.
They won't unless you are already on "their list" My phone basically looks like a burner phone, I do not use social media, do not install apps, my iphone fits (with room to spare) all "apps" on a "single page." I just call and text from my phone and have a browser and maps and that is basically it.
Years ago I chatted with a border guard from another country about their job (while they were not working). Not having a phone nowadays would be considered "strange" enough to flag you. If you're not a citizen of said country, it could even dramatically increase the odds of disallowing you entry. Often this would prevent you returning for a set number of years.
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.
I'm a bit mystified why anyone would bring an electronic device over an international border with anything that could be construed, fairly or not, as evidence of criminal behavior.
I don't agree with all this and this increasingly fascist regime but... this was the most predictable outcome. Consider these two scenarios.
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 court has not yet determined whether the use of the duress PIN/password was legal. There's definitely no consensus among legal experts of it being illegal as you're portraying it. The US has strong legal protections against self-incrimination and unreasonable searches despite erosion of how much people's rights are respected.
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.
> 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.
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.
I used a very specific word for a very specific reason. That word was "spoliation". It is a legal word. It means destroying evidence but it means more than that.
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.
They didn't get the data from his phone and will likely lose the case against him. They probably wanted data to go after other people and those people were protected against it.
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.
Y'know, makes me wonder why Democrates didn't disband ICE and CBP when they had control over the Congress and the government. I mean, they knew those agencies would be used in precisely this way, yet did nothing anyhow.
Democrats built the blueprint for ICE's deportation program and architected the law that enabled it.
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.
IIRIRA was not a 'Clinton' bill. It was initially drafted by Lamar Smith (r) of Texas (HR 2202) and subsequently attached to an appropriations bill (HR 2610), and passed with a bipartisan veto-proof majority.
Huh? He signed it and evangelized it heavily, speaking about his strong support for the bill.
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.
The decoy passcode feature should boot into a separate partition that looks like a normal phone setup, and during that time quietly erase the user's actual data. They would never have known if it worked like this.
Probably, but it will be more valuable for society for him to be tried and found not guilty, setting a legal precedent.
… that dude probably would have preferred not having that in their life
Not necessarily? He’s an activist. Getting arrested on purpose to prove a point is a classical activism move
perhaps, but what public activity isn't activism?
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.
> perhaps, but what public activity isn't 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.
People pay extra for free range eggs to discourage battery farming, I’d say that counts?
it's only activism when it comes from the woke region of cascadia, otherwise it's just sparkling disgruntlement
You don't think product selection is a form of activism?
It's not really comparable. When activists vokuntarily face, and especially when they are in fact, subject to substantial hardship and punishment is when you start changing hearts and minds. Otherwise it's either ignored or generates contempt.
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.
Abbie Hoffman has entered the chat
Rosa Parks has entered the bus
Alex Jones entered your living room
That's not going to stop authoritarians from harassing. Want an example of how this played out?
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.
Assuming he is found (edit: not) guilty, which is not guaranteed at all
Trumps DOJ has destroyed credibility with federal judges all ove the country. They’ve had more than one case come back not guilty so far (subway sandwich guy). I’m optimistic they fail to get a guilty verdict here too.
Sandwich guy was acquitted by a jury, not a judge.
That's positive. I don't live in the USA and I sort of actively avoid news from there. It's good to hear that the federal courts aren't necessarily on Trump's side
Like most things in the States, it depends VERY heavily on location.
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.
Except that's not going to happen because evidence spoliation (legal term) is a crime. And that's what he did. You can say it shouldn't be but it is. This is slam dunk and it happens all the time. It's the same crime as destroying evidence that's been subpoenaed or that it has a preservation hold on it.
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.
Not physically possible[1] to be deniable and a bad[2] idea.
[1] https://veracrypt.io/en/Wear-Leveling.html
https://veracrypt.io/en/Trim%20Operation.html
[2] https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2082153517234676150#m
I don't understand how wear leveling makes deniability impossible. You just have to overwrite sectors in the false partition at the same rate as ones in the true partition. Since both the true and false partitions are encrypted, their contents are mathematically indistinguishable from randomness when viewed without the decryption key.
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...
Question on a detail: It's not necessary to have deniability on the fact that you did wipe your device, just on the fact that you did it after you entered the border? Or said differently, if he'd wiped the device before entering the border, it'd be all fine?
(That of course only takes down the "physically impossible" part.)
I do believe that yes, if it was wiped before entering, there would be no charges (unless there was a shadow docket open... that gets murky)
You don’t need it to delete anything, anyway. The encrypted second partition is indistinguishable from random data, so you don’t need to delete it.
No recent messages and no recent email would be a pretty big giveaway. It’s a lot of work to make the decoy part of the phone look genuine.
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?
That seems overcomplicated and opening yourself up to risk
IMO the correct solution is to erase your phone before crossing the border, and then restore it after you’ve crossed
What’s to stop them from seeing an empty phone, and then accuse you of deleting it when they asked to see it?
That isn't a crime. It's not a crime to travel across the border with a factory reset phone. That is a fine thing to do and a regular practice for people working in some sensitive areas.
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.
Lack of evidence.
100% I have built similar behavior in my [0] encrypted storage app for iOS. User creates a "duress vault" which is an ordinary vault that user can store any data they want (usually something very inconspicuous). If this vault is opened, it will wipe out all the other vaults silently without actually showing any sign of doing so and still preserving the duress vault's data. Even if snapshot of files is made, the index and keys are gone and can't be recovered.
[0] https://vaultaire.app/features/duress-mode/
What do you do that you need something like that?
Me personally? Nothing.
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.
Is there a way to implement this on my Android phone?
Cops collaborate with tech corps all the time now. Generational churn means the cops now are not tech illiterate Barney Fife's
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
While I agree with your sentiment, I have to imagine that the decision makers are still older and more out of touch?
Decision makers are never going to be responsible for such low level clerical work as reading every tech company product release.
For exactly the border search scenario, I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs. Imagine booting the phone from a flash drive, making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive, and writing a fresh OS before reaching the border.
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.
It may be fun to fantasize about these things some times, but there is no technical solution to tyranny. Laws are not like code, intent matters. Ultimately if the intent is that the government wants to see your private data, hiding it in any way will be charged - it doesn't matter if you jump through hoops to avoid this specific instance.
This is a half-truth. 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. The USA is somewhere in between.
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.
Unreasonable search is always under attack though. There are many instances today of cops forcibly entering a home claiming nothing more than a welfare check, or "we received a call."
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.)
>There are many instances today of cops forcibly entering a home claiming nothing more than a welfare check, or "we received a call."
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.
There's also plenty of examples of even if the evidence is thrown out, there's damage to life or property that is never made whole.
I'm personally less concerned with those cases and more concerned with evidence that ultimately is thrown out allowed them to build a case that otherwise would have gone nowhere.
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.
Maybe a better example as a half decent defense attorney, or the judge, could get subsequent evidence thrown out there.
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.
That's not really relevant this was about going to jail after police break the constitution. If we're talking about bad things cops do there's civil asset forfeiture.
Rights needing to occasionally be upheld by the courts wasn't my complaint though. Its cases where rights we're clearly infringed, at least I'd expect most citizens would agree, and courts uphold it because a person didn't say a particular phrase, for example, or because a "reasonable" cop would have seen a cracked door as implied consent.
>There are many instances today of cops forcibly entering a home claiming nothing more than a welfare check, or "we received a call."
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.
> And there are also many instances of [...] those cops being sued, losing qualified immunity, losing their jobs
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...
It isn't foolproof though, and police and DAs have incentive to both work together and to look the other way.
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.
Can you link to some of these cases of cops losing qualified immunity? It's an area in interested in but I understand that to be a vanishingly rare outcome - like only in very egregious cases, not just for run of the mill rights violations.
In case this isn't a bot and simply someone unfamiliar with the internet search, here is a snippet from the Google AI results when searching for the phrase, "list of US court cases where police lost qualified immunity."
--------
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...
Or your family gets the payout because the cops killed you.
Border search exception lowers the requirements for judicial oversight.
"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.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
It's really crazy. If 2/3 of us don't have privacy rights then what are we even doing.
we're far closer to one side of that spectrum than the other. consider the retroactively legalized mass wiretapping, room 641A, NIST compromises, PRISM, 14 Eyes, the other Snowden revelations, etc
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
shudder. but, where else could we go? switzerland? my point being we need to try to get 1995 back. id gladly trade my iphone for a car phone.
Agree with the thrust of your comment, but I had to comment on this:
> 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.
Theres a reason why the motto of banana republic leaders is: "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law"
I think I mostly disagree with this. "Technical compliance" is not and should not be the thing that a legal system is designed to incentivize, and should not be the criterion for "perfect rule of law."
I would disagree with you, because "technical compliance" is compliance with the letter of the law. You have complied with every explicit requirement of the law. If the law is insufficient then legislature is free to add a clause that bans whatever aspect you technically comply with that they don't like.
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".
What should be the thing that it is designed to incentivize, then? Compliance with the spirit of the law?
Having good technical tools won't fix a failing society, but they're still nice to have and they make state surveillance of its citizens just a little bit harder. I mean, where would we be without strong cryptography?
these are abuses of existing powers, rather than acting with reckless abandon
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.
This is false. If you can image and wipe your phone on the plane before landing, and write those random bytes to a usb stick, the usb stick will appear blank, because encrypted data is noise. You land with a factory blank phone. You clear customs and get where you are going and restore your phone.
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.
How do you solve it when they beat you for having a phone that doesn't look like they want?
Like whatever arbitrary thing they decide it should look like that day.
Normally I agree, but making the implementation initially ineffective is a good way to complicate more far reaching measures.
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.
Yes, trying to solve a regulation or legal issue by some technical workaround will never work, you have to fight it at the same level, legally, or system-wise, otherwise, you will be like the person who tries to wash the stairs from the bottom all the way up, it rarely works, you gotta go up to down, collectively go against the matter rather than individually duct taping it for your own specific needs. In that example, it won’t be far fetched the same ones who made it illegal to wipe your phone to make illegal to install xyz OS or using abc protocol, in fact, that’s exactly what they are trying to do under the disguise of “protect the kids” and going after encryption or similar privacy related issues.
They would not be so vehemently against it if it did not work. There is a reason E2EE, duress passwords and similar technologies are under such intense assault these days.
Destruction of evidence as a crime goes back a long, long way. There's no precedent for making it illegal to install some OS or protocol the feds don't like. I don't particularly like what's being done to this guy, but what he did was pretty stupid. You can't be obligated to incriminate yourself but you aren't allowed to destroy evidence.
GrapheneOS has built-in encrypted backup and restore. It backs up the same data transferred by Google's device transfer feature for moving to a new phone which is nearly all app data, the data in the home directory, contacts and a bit more. Certain apps such as Signal encrypt their own data with another layer of encryption using a hardware keystore key. Signal's own backup system needs to be used for that, although it can just be used as a way to get data into the system backup.
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.
> GrapheneOS has built-in encrypted backup and restore.
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.
This has gotten much better fairly recently ime. My backups to WebDAV work most of the time and when it fails I get notifications. But it was quite bad for a long time so I sympathize with your point
> 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.
You added it by copying Blackberry[1]? But seriously how did you think of that feature?
Genius feature when you put it like that.
[1] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/40700-grapheneos-protection...
Those "nandroid" backups weren't "close" to that, they were literally that initially. Then, when Android phones started coming with the /sdcard partition mapped to the internal flash memory (a subdirectory of /data) instead of an actual SD card, the /data partition backup mechanism was changed to copy individual files into some sort of archive, but the end result remained the same.
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.
How many mainstream phones come with unlocked bootloaders? Just pixel right?
Fairphone
You have to ask yourself why this isn't possible anymore. Similar to how recording calls used to be possible but no longer. I don't know why it is but it is awfully strange that they keep tightening the belt on what we can do with our own devices.
I really really want this for GrapheneOS. The current backup situation is terrible and nowhere near being able to easily image and restore the entire phone (or at least user data).
Also, it is just a nice idea if you are prone to losing phones. Backups are good for all kinds of reasons.
There's a way simpler solution and it's just to leave your phone at home and put your SIM in a different handset without all your data on it
An increasing portion of phones are eSIM [0] only these days, and the difficulty of swapping can be weirdly-bad depending on provider.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESIM
But non esims exist still, and if you're that worried about security, you can get one.
Not forever though, and if you're an iPhone user, already current iPhones sold in the US are eSIM only. So in some number of years (depenfing on your device oldness tolerance), they will become obsolete eventually.
US iPhones don’t have sim slots at all anymore.
Can't one just buy some craphone for like $50? with whatever sim.
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.
PinePhone will boot off a microSD before the internal flash, so you could have a clean OS on the card and your real one on the flash. The SD card is under the back cover with the battery and SIM, so chances are they won't think to try to remove it.
It'd be less of a hassle to buy a burner phone to travel with. It's not a felony to not bring your main phone when leaving the country.
I agree. Here's my method.
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.
I've restored iPhones before, and it does seem pretty simple. Easier than PCs for sure. It's not instant, but the basic configuration is restored pretty quickly while the bulk data restoration happens in the background while you're able to use the phone.
What about banking apps and stuff? Does the device binding still work or do you need to set it up again?
Depends on the app and security setup. If it's using old school Symantec VIP Access, it will not survive a restore. If it is using TOTP from 1Password, it will. Not sure about other options, those are the two I am most familiar with. Thankfully I only have a single app these days relying on VIP Access.
It is not remotely simple. So much is lost on device change.
Isn’t this basically what you do with an iPhone. You reset/format it then it gets back to its original state with iCloud?
> ...making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive... refuse to unlock the drive
How is this any different than refusing to unlock the phone? It just seems you've added unnecessary extra steps.
As I understand it, the drive can thus be seized, and a potential loss of a cheap flash drive is a lower inconvenience than loss of the phone.
Think for a moment. What is the difference between giving them a password which wipes the phone and giving them a password which opens a blank phone?
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.
> What is the difference between giving them a password which wipes the phone and giving them a password which opens a blank phone?
> 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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcgnBjHOK2g
Tyranny does not care about "proof".
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.
are we seriously approaching a point where its quasi-illegal to not participate in the socials?
More like they've looked you up and the apps being missing would be a giveaway about the dummy phone
So it’s becoming illegal to not have the Facebook app installed on your phone if you have a Facebook account?
The best technical solution is one code opens to a phone that has things but isn't your actual phone, and then another code that opens to your real phone.
One is destroying evidence and the other is not.
Have you considered "no password set"?
>What is the difference between giving them a password which wipes the phone and giving them a password which opens a blank phone?
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.
Really? Does it take a long time to recover the phone? Haven’t really ever needed to recover a backup
Apple makes this very easy. I broke an iPhone and bought a replacement. If you have iCloud, you login to the new phone and you can see which backups you can recover from. If you are transferring a phone, say you upgraded, it’s even easier. You can also image the phone with a connected laptop and store it on a backup drive, which is nice to not use up iCloud limits.
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.
Aha that is actually pretty long
That's mostly time for data sync in the background. It takes 5-10 minutes tops to have the phone working again, but longer to get all of the media and other data restored. Depends on how good your connection is.
> refuse to unlock the drive. The drive gets seized and you go on your way (if you're a US citizen entering the USA)
… yeah I doubt that nowadays honestly
I mean, you could ship your real phone to w/e destination ahead of you and bring a $50 burner to the border. If you're a person of interest this won't work because they can monitor you and the destination but if you're a regular schmuck then a burner that never touches your private data or accounts and has a bunch of dummy stuff on it will get you past the border goons.
How about every civilian banding together and refusing to comply?
in before those fucking "I hAvE nOtHiNg tO hIdE" twats
I already refuse to comply with questioning at the border. Been being harassed and my non-citizen travel companions being SA’d by CBP for decades. Get with the program.
> For exactly the border search scenario, I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs.
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.
Only app data, not the apps themselves. On restore you need an internet connection to redownload the applications.
> I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs. Imagine booting the phone from a flash drive, making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive, and writing a fresh OS before reaching the border.
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.
Except apps themselves don't get backed up, only their data. So if you had any apps that are no longer in the app store or that came from outside of it (e.g. TestFlight or development builds), those won't be restored.
All Archive pages, when accessed from Italy, now are blocked by the Government:
"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.
We can research on what happened, but it is pretty obvious...
You are nonetheless talking about the .ph - only that.
And: italy has done much, much, 1000000 orders much worse (Gutenberg).
I am currently in Italy (just passing through) and was able to open the archive link with the article
If you're using roaming on your cellular plan, all your traffic is routed over VPN to your home country, so local blocks don't work.
(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.
Then you probably had a home country IP and they filter based on IP.
I used to play around on projects adjacent to Tor and TailsOS, and had an idea for a setup I was researching. It's a little intense and probably has annoying failure modes, but sharing in case anyone else finds it helpful:
- 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...)
Or keep it in a faraday bag and have the phone wipe if it sees it. If you're ever searched (or otherwise indisposed), they'll open the bag and wipe your phone for you.
Oh hey, I like this variant! So... both the BLE beacon and the phone have a faraday cage, and if they ever appear together outside their cages, the phone wipes?
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...)
I was imagining only the BLE beacon living in one of those little faraday pouches people put their key fobs in. They should be pretty much transparent passing through the x-ray and a pouch with an airtag in it wouldn't raise any suspicion at all at the airport.
Only once you're getting invasively searched would they (ideally) dump the pouch out into the tray with your phone.
This depends on the beacon being visible. If they just take the phone and walk away, because that's where they think the evidence is, it won't wipe.
When I've gotten secondary screening the first thing they do is take all my belongings and rifle through them on a table. That seems to be standard practice and I'm sure it was step 1 in Tunick's ordeal.
Both approaches have situations they wouldn't work in. If you're extra paranoid you could do both.
> If you're ever searched (or otherwise indisposed), they'll open the bag and wipe your phone for you.
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.
It's not the exact same situation. Whether it's similar enough to be prosecuted or convicted is a different question.
I don't see how. Regardless of how you feel about the lawfulness of the overall situation, Tunick gave an agent false information which resulted in the phone being wiped. That's intent.
This requires no action whatsoever from the phone's owner, you could even be unconscious/dead and it would still work.
The intent in that scenario is to wipe your phone (destroy evidence) when a bag is searched by federal agents.
I think there's a version of this where you can reasonably say you forgot you'd set this up. Like if they disassemble your whole bag, lay the BLE beacon out, and wipe the phone... You can claim it's a theft deterrent for thieves who might steal your bag and rummage thru it?
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 :)
I like the idea of a phone that automatically wipes itself if I don’t act to stop it. I wonder about the legality of that if the duress code is considered “destroying evidence.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49040537
Action vs inaction seems like an important distinction.
I used to contribute to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USBKill
Ah I recall I used to see the creator around :) thanks for your work!
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
tfw face when I leave my phone on the table and go to the restaurant bathroom only to return to a brand new squeaky clean factory reset
With no third party apps you can set an iPhone to wipe itself after 10 failed passcode attempts.
US law enforcement is well aware of it.
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.
U.S. citizens are going to need obtain a burner phone before returning, and load it with the absolute minimum to load boarding passes, etc., perhaps some reading material or a movie to watch on the plane, and be prepared to share full credentials for thing at the border.
(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.)
I think it's enough to shut down you phone. Then it needs a pin, and you're entitled to not give that over, I believe. So you should be safe, apart from some kind of rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
> So you should be safe, apart from some kind of rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
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.
I've worked with Cellebrite, the industry standard in IT forensics for unlocking and imaging phones. It just runs a series of known exploits. PIN lock, data encryption and regular updates will beat it most of the time.
> I've worked with Cellebrite
Any chance you want to do a public service and publish the latest compatibility matrix?
Just joking, obviously…
Before First Unlock with recent hardware and an up to date OS is probably sufficiently infallible for an average person. I wouldn't want to rely on it if I was engaged in espionage, but for someone who won't get the NSA pulled into the case, I'd be pretty confident. This leaked Cellebrite support matrix shows that BFU was secure against them for iPhones that were nearly four years old at the time, and I doubt it's become significantly worse since then: https://ia800405.us.archive.org/32/items/inseyets-offline-uf...
If you don't give a pin, they can seize your devices (Andrew Tate on his 1st visit to Florida said that he refused to give pin and they seized phone and laptop)
They can't keep them, you'll get the devices back. Use a temp phone in the mean time.
Sad that we have to accept this as a risk of international travel, but here we are.
They can absolutely keep them. Or they can just "lose" them "accidentally". Who exactly would force them to give them back? Or put another way, who exactly will punish them if they break the law?
They can’t keep them permanently, but unfortunately they have in the past kept them from some people for years, until the hardware was past its useful life. It’s a good idea to only travel with electronics you don’t mind losing (and not just because of this).
You have a worldview that’s incompatible with the reality of the current US legal system where things work the way you believe they should, rather than the way they actually do.
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.
I don’t see how what you said contradicts anything I said, and I suspect you didn’t even read it. Yes, people have before had their devices seized for years, and courts wouldn’t return it sooner. That’s literally what I said.
Honestly, I think this is still fine for most people. The probability of a border agent asking me to unlock my phone is very, very low. The inconvenience of using a burner phone is high.
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.
It's not sad, it's always been the case, and just expanding areas that are implementing it. It seems a lot of people here haven't travelled, or especially haven't travelled to 'restrictive' places in the past.
I've been to Russia, China (about ten times,) central Asian -stans, various parts of South America, Africa, etc. My phones and laptops (plural because I travel with >2/ea, and it looks kind of weird,) have never been inspected.
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.
They’ll keep them until you sue. A lawsuit costs more than the devices.
You will lose them.
That seems like a wildly different scenario to me. The OP is about a guy who has not committed any crimes. Andrew Tate is a known predator and CSAM peddler, with an active warrant in several countries.
I'll take that risk. It's pretty unlikely, and if it happens, having to buy a new phone is not the worst thing in the world.
> Then it needs a pin
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.
That’s probably why they’ve been pushing the MPC app heavily.
If you’re a U.S. citizen: CBP cannot deny you entry to the United States merely because you refuse to unlock the phone. If you’re a non-citizen seeking admission: refusal is much riskier.
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.
Isn't the guarantee for citizens a bit stronger than CBP's policy? I don't think they can lawfully deny entry of a citizen, period.
They cannot (lawfully) deny entry. But they can admit you and then immediately detain and/or arrest you.
Sure, if they have a warrant or probable cause, just like any other law enforcement officer.
In theory, yes, but in practice they can do whatever they want, and suing them after the fact is going to be expensive, and have a high probability of not working out for you.
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.
this only applies if they don't refuse to acknowledge your papers as valid and/or they haven't previously put you on some hidden list of people of interest, in which case the instance where you get to prove you're who you say you are will be mediated, like the rest of the (as per the current system) nonpeople, by as many layers of humilliation and risk to your life and health as they can place.
I’ve been asked to hand over my phone when I entered India as a visitor with a valid visa. Yes it was a burner phone. Yes the officer questioned me after seeing only 7 photos in the entire Photos app. It was very obvious that it was a burner phone. I didn’t deceive the officer, instead I just nicely explained why this was a burner phone.
Yep, travelling outside your country of origin, expect that your phone/laptop/ect is subject to search. Anything on you is, it's literally stated. Want to push against that? Sure, makes sense, but just carry a burner phone/device and not worry about it. Literally what the US government recommends when traveling to places like China.
Giving up knowledge (password) is something that is typically scrutinized at the border as well. Had he just handed over the phone and the phone had abilities to self destruct if tampered with (e.g too many incorrect pin entries) -- well the gov's case wouldn't been much harder. If they seized property and accidently destroyed the data, then that's on them.
You are correct, you have to give up the phone but can't be compelled to give up the password, and you'd get it back some indeterminate amount of time later.
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.
As everything on your phone should be backed up, you could just wipe your phone to new.
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?
I wouldn't really want to deal with the suspicions of having a freshly-wiped phone, or the suspicions of having no phone at all.
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.
Just get a boarding pass from the counter old school style. They still print them.
Why would they need to do that?
leave electronics at home. never take electronics to any airport unless you don't care if everything is read. your only option now.
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.
That's probably a bit overkill. TSA doesn't have nearly as much power as CBP, so it's only a concern when coming back across the international border.
the best decoy is a cheap burner phone that you only use for travel purposes
According to the article, he was actually using GrapheneOS and gave the border official the Duress PIN. So I guess technically it was the official that erased the data :-)
Not how the law works. If I put a bomb in a box. It will explode if a certain pin is put in. And you ask ”can I open the box? What is the pin?” And I say ”here is the pin to open it” and the bomb explodes. Do you think I can claim they blew up themselves ?
It's already a crime to build a bomb, so it's a moot point.
Moot to anyone who died, but you'd still be charged with the crime of building a bomb and the crime of murder.
My point is even if it hadn't blown up you would've committed a crime anyway, whereas if you rig a phone to erase its own data upon entering a PIN and the PIN is not entered, you haven't committed a crime. The two situations are different enough not to be analogous.
I'd guess the smiley indicates that op meant it as a joke.
Let’s try for a less hyperbolic analogy
Yes. Because law enforcement assumes there's bombs in boxes by default and defers to the bomb squad to understand the box before they touch it.
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.
Sure, you're right that this analogy is bad, because that would never happen.
But if it did, you'd still be on the hook for the bomb, even though technically the LEO set it off through incompetence.
An analogy should not be judged on whether or not it can realistically happen, nor whether it can be manipulated in some way that capitalizes on the differences.
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.
I never told you it is a box with a bomb. You just asked if you can have the pin. You can do another example where you give false information with the intent of making another person take an action that they don’t wanna take and would not take unless you had provided false information. You are causing the action to happen. Just like if you yell fire in a theater. You didn’t stamped anyone to death. But your words caused it.
You don't have to tell me a bomb is in the box because it doesn't change the fact that bomb squad is called before officers know what's in the box.
Why would the bomb squad be called after the box is unlocked and the contents revealed?
A better feature would be a 2nd PIN that unlocks the phone to a secondary profile, which you would leave pretty bare for situations like these.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49395135
With some embarrassing porn; something that would make it feel legit and cause a distraction.
A few hundred personal dick pics and they'll be handing it back quickly.
Or smarter yet, not bare. Looks like a normal phone - innocent-looking vacation photos, innocent-looking social media accounts, innocent-looking email....
I wonder whether it'd be better for a duress PIN to delete existing data and also create a semi plausible artificial profile to hide the deletion event.
This discussion was raised last time this story was discussed. I was among its advocates: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49061890>.
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).
I think for the case we're talking about here, though, it would be doable. This doesn't need to thwart deep forensic analysis. It just needs to survive a border agent thumbing through the contents of your phone for a bit. If the fake profile data looks plausible, and doesn't raise any flags, the agent gives the phone back and you're on your way.
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.)
Thanks for sharing - I get the concerns people have raised in those threads, however I still feel something in this space could be useful.
Even a duress PIN which triggers predefined deletion of certain folders, messages and apps could reduce law enforcement exposure significantly.
Deleting arbitrary directories, messages and app data would be highly unreliable. There's a high likelihood of the data being recovered. It's not how computer filesystems and storage are designed to work. 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.
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.
> Reliable deletion of data requires setting it up to be reliably deleted later on
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.
You misunderstood the parent post, it's extremely difficult to delete the data without leaving a trace that something was deleted.
I don’t agree. On an encrypted volume all space unallocated by the filesystem should have random data in it and should be indistinguishable from the portion representing in-use filesystem data. Deleting data securely involves overwriting all the previously allocated filesystem blocks with random data. No one should be able to discern that now-empty space had data in it as of some specific recent datetime.
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.
To reliably delete a specific file or directory, it needs to be encrypted with a dedicated key which can be reliably deleted. It can have dedicated key material in the secure element used to derive sub-keys from the main encryption keys or it could simply be encrypted with another layer of encryption.
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.
> I mean - yes? If you design a subtle duress pin that only hides certain things, users would have to choose what.
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.
Maybe it could cause the phone to "randomly" bootloop or something? "Oh no, my phone is broken again, last time this happened I needed to do a factory reset"
Private 0-day exploits?
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).
> I wonder whether it'd be better for a duress PIN to delete existing data
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.
Just wanted to say I appreciate your comprehensive comments in this thread. Learned a lot.
Or put a dead man's switch on there
He is charged with obstruction. Not "erasing data". Was he intentionally trying to hinder a search that was being legally conducted?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice_in_the_...
Interesting. So is this GrapheneOS indeed operationally good for keeping one‘s data private?
I mean, it sounds like it would be even better if the duress response was more subtle.
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.
He had an e-reader and phone. My solution would be set the phone's duress pin to the e-reader's actual pin then consent to the e-reader search providing its pin and see what happens.
The actual solution is cloud backup + re-image after the border.
Yes if you don’t mind getting arrested by our fascist border police
I don’t think that would fly as a defense in court.
He’ll just have to pray the scene wasn’t recorded and his real PIN was one digit off
>I don’t think that would fly as a defense in court
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
> by presenting a phone that no long contains evidence
Evidence Tampering
https://xkcd.com/1494/
Yeah if they can catch you and prove it.
Even if they can’t prove it, they can make your life really miserable for quite a while.
If it was implemented in such a way, there would be no reason to suspect anyone of using it because it would be totally indistinguishable from not having used it. At that point they have no grounds for legal action. Unless they could monitor FS/disk activity, but that goes beyond typical airport security stuff.
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.
As soon as that starts, authorities will charge people just for having GrapheneOS. There are 0 checks and balances right now, it's a free for all.
As things stand right now, software is 1-A protected speech. I'm not sure how long that will be the case with growing authoritarianism, specifically wrt to tech, on both sides of the aisle. I am concerned it may be considered probable cause though -- like how you can legally have an ax in the bed of your pickup but it's a free pass for a cop to search your vehicle if they're so inclined -- but really, they can manufacture probable cause for anyone if they want so it's kind of moot. You may be attracting unnecessary attention though if you've got "GrapheneOS" on your lock screen. But this goes back to my original point, they still have to catch you in the first place.
(1) Keep manufacturer's Android plus some plausible apps and data in a reserved part of the drive. (2) GrapheneOS runs from the other part of the drive. (3) Make sure PIN screen designed to not give away the OS. (4) When duress PIN is entered, erase GrapheneOS and restore manufacturer's Android. (5) Now you won't be charged for having GrapheneOS because they won't know you had it.
No, to my knowledge, they ask you to enter your PIN/password yourself. They don't enter it for you. I believe he entered it himself, at which point the erasure began. The erasure process was witnessed by the officer.
From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/activist-charged-wit...
> 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.”
So the real problem in the end is that your duress system should not put a big message "erasing all data" but "loading" slowly and just look mostly empty.
You sir have nailed it. Unfortunately, GrapheneOS seems too stuck up to eagerly appreciate and address such real world nuances.
They don't add features that rely on security through obscurity, would give attackers tons of attack surface, is physically impossible to make actually deniable, and could put regular GrapheneOS users in physical danger in authoritarian regimes.
Legal Eagle just covered this, it's quite interesting analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rokxux5cU
Great link. The most relevant part for me is the last couple minutes (22:00): it's only against the law to destroy evidence if it can be established that such evidence exists. This feels like a more elaborate version of accidentally losing a stack of papers to a gust of wind just as you hand them over.
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!"
Not even a minute in. "Oh, he's protesting Cop City, got it. This is just police harassment."
The guy from Game Changer?
Yes. And Paul Refereeno will be the judge in this case
If you initiate a wipe before approaching immigration, which swaps the whole phone contents to an encrypted backup that you physically can't decrypt without a key that (say) a friend knows. Then you would be offering immigration the device in an unaltered state between when they request it and when they receive it. Any request for an alternative pass code or whether the pass code given will alter the state of the device can be honestly answered.
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.
This case has a very specific legal framing to it, but border agents don't actually need anything more than suspicion to keep you locked for a day or two.
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.
" If the law is just about intent, you can never defeat it."
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.
How is this legally different from just not unlocking your phone? Which in this scenario seems like it'd be fine.
The worst case of refusing to unlock your phone is that they keep your phone for some days/weeks/months while they investigate.
I'm not a legal expert, but all this seems to check out with US law. Americans need to remember that some of their constitutional rights don't really apply at ports of entry by design. This inconvenient truth for the land of the free has existed for a long time, this situation is just drawing attention to it. Their powers are far-reaching.
Fun fact, there is a long standing exemption to the unreasonable search and seizure protection laws if you're out on a boat (it may only be on the open ocean and Great Lakes, though IANAL). One of the earliest Supreme Court rulings essentially said that without it, it would be impossible for the US to enforce tariffs, which were the main source of revenue at the time. Anybody who boats often enough has been boarded by the coast guard for various safety checks that allows them to poke around and there's little you can do about it.
Any “navigable waters” fall under this jurisdiction which at a minimum includes all salt water and the Great Lakes, plus a few other odds and ends rivers and so forth. Indeed, almost all state and landside federal law goes out the window on a boat - a frequently bumped into example by boaters here in Washington is getting a civil penalty flavored reminder from USCG that cannabis is still (for whatever reasons) federally an illegal substance, and having it on a boat at all is an offense (with larger amounts or future violations escalating as far as seizure of the vessel).
Marine laws are nuts.
Furthermore, "the law" in this area is currently different in different Federal circuit court jurisdictions...
The US / common law jurisdictions typically only have very light self-incrimination protections. The 5th amendment in the US only protects against self-incriminating testimonial. That's it.
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.
That's interesting. Where can I read more about this?
"[...] Since 1953, the US Department of Justice has defined the border to be anywhere within 100 miles of the actual national limits.[...] According to the American Civil Liberties Union, about two-thirds of the people in the US live within 100 miles of a border. So in theory these 200 million border zone dwellers could have their phones seized and searched at any time by CBP agents without a warrant.[...]"
From the register (2023)
https://www.theregister.com/security/2023/06/01/us-court-fin...
Iirc this does not allow for warrantless home searches, so they can’t just waltz into your house and demand your phone. 100 miles is still wild tho.
So the part of this that feels like it triggers the government issue here is that in effect you have a locally stored encryption key which gates access to the device, which was removed from the device due to duress password.
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).
Yeah, so caveat emptor: the legal system isn't something you can hack like a computer...
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.
See https://www.cbp.gov/document/directives/cbp-directive-no-334...
> 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.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say
The existence of a key only being somewhere other than your current location during a border search enables you to legally say "I cannot unlock this device" and move on with your day.
Well even today this guy could have just said 'I will not unlock this device' and they can seize it for some time, but they can't deny you entry. Which is pretty much the same scenario you created except the guy literally can't unlock it (but that doesn't actually matter here, he never _had_ to unlock it).
> 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.
I'm talking specifically about the graphene OS ability for that approach, not the ability to add an external key to some generalized encryption. The threat model here is that the traveler was required to provide a passcode unlocking a key they had with them on their phone. If that threat is not there, then this bypasses problem.
I always enter US with all of my devices wiped and restore them from backup once I'm past immigration, simply because I don't trust government to maintain the security level my job requires.
Now I'm worried that this will be held against me..
I don't get the legal contradiction.
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?
I think you legally are in the US while at an American border crossing - at least if the crossing is on US land, which it was in this case. It might be more complicated for preclearance spots. It's just that normal rights are suspended there despite being in the US, even for citizens. Make of that what you will.
Your rights are not suspended, but border agents don’t need a reason to investigate you
And if you are a citizen, they can’t deny you entry. They can make it take a while, but you will be admitted.
...and then they start violating all your rights after starting the investigation lol. its just wordplay.
The Constitution makes no exemption for a suspension of rights at the border.
The Supreme court disagrees with you.
The supreme court is made of fallible humans
Have you read https://yalelawjournal.org/forum/customs-immigration-and-rig... ? Quoting from its abstract:
> 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 Supreme Court often disagrees with itself.
The alleged crime is knowingly interfering with a lawful search (by providing a duress password that deleted the phone). Location has nothing to do with it.
The location is the crux of the "lawful" part of the search.
Are you a lawyer? I’m not, but the Legal Eagle video linked elsewhere in this thread says that the reasons for the search are the crux of the “lawful” part, not the location.
(The location was at the port of entry—the border—which is pretty much the definition of the CBP’s jurisdiction.)
That is a most interesting and underrated point.
It's a fairly shallow point that ignores how laws work.
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.
Huh, that is inconsistent. The problem with your comment is noted right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390318
Not really - the government have stated that he's in the US. It's the first sentence of the indictment. [1]
> 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.
It doesn’t matter where he was when he deleted the data. He could be in China, it’s still a crime in the us to destroy evidence wanted by American authorities.
You're speaking nonsense since there was no charge or warrant against him. People are free to use their phone for f sake.
Evidence exists independent of a charge or warrant. The instant they asked for access to the phone, it became evidence. If he had entered the duress code himself before walking up to the agent, he'd be fine. Nerds thinking that technicalities is how the law works is why he's in hot water.
Law enforcement doesn’t need a warrant to search phones at the border. I agree this is a terrible rule but it is the rule right now.
Have you read https://yalelawjournal.org/forum/customs-immigration-and-rig... ? Quoting from its abstract:
> 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
Is that the 100 mile wide border?
You have lost track of the chain of discussion.
right, there's a contradiction here:
- 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?
The US views that US law applies worldwide. There is no requirement that you be anywhere near the US to be under US jurisdiction for an alleged offense against the US, according to the US.
Also, that constitutional protections are suspended within 100 miles of a land, sea, or air border.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, since your statement is true:
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22497
Although obviously not all US laws apply and enforcement is a whole other kettle of fish.
where's that in the Constitution?
4A still doesn't permit you to destroy the evidence. Resist on 4A grounds, destroy the evidence, 4A reasons get overturned - you've got yourself a conviction. US v. Akram Musleh.
in practice you're right, but it's hard to see how that squares with the 4A.
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?
> 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.
I hope some day border agents ask for my phone, because I have not used one or even had a cell phone plan in over 5 years. Checkmate, assholes.
Do you still have a phone number(you can use something like jmp.chat on desktop)? If not, how do you navigate services like banks or utilities that demand one?
That’s quite a feat
https://archive.is/SflVC
Thanks. Really wish this was higher.
It's like those notices "by clicking accept below you agree to giving up your data", by purchasing a ticket to visit US all your data are belong to the US.
I am baffled that the number of comments trying to work around a problem that shouldn't exists is above zero. No, this crap shouldn't happen. It's an appalling situation that it is happening at all.
Seems like it would be better to have a truecrypt type of situation, where if you put in a certain pin, then it just logs you into a separate OS with nothing you want to hide.
Obviously have the duress pin if what’s in your phone is worse than the obstruction charges too.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389273>
In the truecrypt scenario you’d be using the hidden and encrypted volume only for what you explicitly want to keep hidden and use the other one for your daily life.
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.
For a much better-informed source than me, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392816>. (GrapheneOS HN account.)
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.
I'd say better would be not trying to pull a fast one on the cops. Rather than trying to sneak past them and local innocuous, just exercise your right to say no.
> 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."
Does anyone know if this border security inspection is a goon scrolling through your photos, or do they just copy the whole memory of your phone to a real “threat detector”.
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.
There are different levels of "search" and the law (as interpreted by the courts) is not currently fully settled. The LegalEagle YouTube video on this case is excellent, as always:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rokxux5cU
Amendment 4:
"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."
But the bar for hauling someone to court and defacto punishing them financially and smearing them in the eyes of the public is so low. And the path to getting compensation for wrongful prosecution so fraught. What an easy tool the justice system is to punish uppity citizens thinking they don't have a king.
You think they'll see a courtroom? Ha! If they're lucky they'll get there in 5yr and $15k.
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.
>Amendment 4:
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.
> He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search
Evidence with regard to which investigation?
Border agents are entitled to investigate anything for any reason more or less
I'm not sure this is 100% true. Courts have found that in order for the exception to the 4th amendment at borders to apply the search has to bear some relationship to the purpose of securing borders. For example
"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.
If you are a US citizen, they are not entitled to your unlocked phone. They need a judicial warrant if they want you to unlock your phone with a PIN/password. It is settled case law that that falls under your protections under the 14th Amendment.
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.
But did they? Was there an actual investigation going on?
It seems like the best course of action would be to argue he did not destroy evidence, just made it unavailable at the location to force the requirement for a search warrant. It would probably be a hard sell, but I can't think of a better argument (not a lawyer).
> Moreover he would have been in the clear if he just kept his mouth shut.
Although then you get a possible delay of undefined duration, additional questioning and seizure of your device.
What's the longest a citizen (with all appopriate documentation on them) has been held by border patrol after refusing to answer any questions? A quick search failed to get me a solid answer to this, other than a general suggestion that 72 hours is probably the practical upper limit (but no statutory limit necessarily exists), and CBP policies say 12 hours.
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.
Problem is, he didn't destroy shit. "He" (by which I mean, technically the agents) deleted a header that's used to encrypt data but can restored from a backup.
This is why we have judges, I wonder if this has been ruled on already. If you filled out a notebook in a special cipher with the cipher stored separately beside it, then when a cop asked for the notebook you handed the cipher over and then burned the cipher right in front of them, is that destruction of evidence? Idk at the end of the day it does have the same result as destroying the data.
>"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.
Deleting isn’t destroying?
Sure, but the issue is he didn't delete his data, he deleted a header with a key in it, that's it, just a few MB. He didn't delete hundreds of GB of chats or browsing history, he deleted a key to access it and that key isn't necessarily the only one that can access it. All the stuff they want can still be accessed just fine if another copy of the key exists.
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.
These neener neener games don't work in reality. Courts aren't autistic computer systems.
That’s semantics. For all intents and purposes he destroyed it, no different than if he stomped on the phone or deleted all the files traditionally.
I don’t think a judge would care about splitting that hair.
I dunno, now that you phrased it this way I feel like it does matter.
Image he took a blow-torch to a safe and the door welded shut. The contents are still there but the door is broken.
Kind of? Let's say he has a detached header on another device and deleted the one on his phone. It's not at all destroyed now. Is what he did still illegal?
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.
I think I misunderstood your original scenario. This one makes a lot more sense. Although I wouldn't want to be in the position of being the test case.
I severely doubt that judges will be impressed with this reasoning.
Evidence of what? Destroying evidence assumes he is guilty of a crime which there be evidence of. Our system is predicated on an assumption of innocence. The normal threshold to accuse is a "reasonable, articulable suspicion." This does not meet that criteria.
Well that's the thing with destroying evidence. If you destroyed it, it becomes harder (or impossible) to prove you did the crime. That's why it's not uncommon for people to be only charged with stuff like "obstruction of justice" rather than the actual crime they allegedly did.
But you can't assume someone committed a crime.
The evidence on your phone may be against someone else, not you. Still evidence.
In this case, the authorities are claiming they were looking for CSAM. So wiping the phone hindered a valid investigation.
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.
They think a well known protester who was savvy enough to wipe their phone was crossing the border with CSAM on their phone? Do people buy this shit?
And what if he was erasing a steamy affair with a border patrol agent? That's not illegal, but releasing knowledge of it could be damaging to all parties for no reason.
if the only evidence of a crime is on your phone, what kind of crime is it?
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?
Destroying evidence or items believed to be evidence is a crime in itself, regardless of whether or not the original "evidence" or lack thereof pertains to a crime.
> Our system is predicated on an assumption of innocence.
In theory. In practice, this is a hopelessly outdated supposition.
"Evidence" of what, exactly? What specific crime did they expect to find evidence of on his phone?
They were pretty obviously hoping to find a specific crime to accuse him of (because he is a protester against the Atlanta "Cop City" thing).
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).
I'm just guessing here, but the most problematic word on the 4th amendment to attack from the government's perspective is "unreasonable". It's easy to see how a phone border search could be construed as reasonable, and (without digging into this deeply) I suspect that's where most of the push back on this will be.
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.
You should check out the LegalEagle video on the case. Covers all these interesting questions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rokxux5cU
> It's easy to see how a phone border search could be construed as reasonable
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?
you don't have those protections at the border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
There is no such exception allowed in the Constitution. And if a case is made that they're not legally in the US yet, then by the same logic, they should not be subject to all the same laws of the US yet.
The Supreme Court has long recognized a border-search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. In United States v. Flores-Montano, the Court looked to the nation’s sovereign “interest in protecting . . . its territorial integrity” to justify such searches.3 In United States v. Montoya de Hernandez, the Court stated, somewhat more narrowly, that Congress is the source of the executive’s power. It explained that “[s]ince the founding of our Republic . . . [Congress has] granted the Executive plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border, without probable cause or a warrant.” The Commerce Clause permits Congress to authorize the seizure of goods at the border.
https://yalelawjournal.org/forum/customs-immigration-and-rig...
> 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 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.
> A wiped phone can't contain contraband, so wiping the phone serves the same purpose as a search.
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?
I see a vast gulf between searching a truck of produce driven by a non-citizen vs intercepting a citizen at the boarder with known affiliations with the opposing political party.
And it's impossible to ignore that context. This is plainly wrong. And people trying to justify this plainly fascist search is sickening.
Even Wikipedia spells out that invasive searches require "reasonable suspicion." So we return to the core question... suspicion of what? Suspicion is not a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
"The government is allowed to use scanning devices and to search personal electronics. Invasive bodily searches, however, require reasonable suspicion." is what the article says
The original text is basically useless. They're more like a mission statement rather than directives. They set up broad aspirations, but the implementation has to be aggregated over literally millions of pages of judicial decisions.
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.
> None of those words what you think they mean.
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.
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but the Constitution binds the government, not citizens. The government can damn well afford to know what the 4th and 5th Amendments mean.
The words are actually extremely clear and its exceptionally prudent to quote them, because nobody with a brain can read them and fail see that the government is simply being unconstitutional - all over the place. Even when the people are powerless, we dont have to give up our powers of seeing the truth. Your post and this whole idea that "the words dont mean what they say they mean" is frankly doublespeak of the lowest form.
I just bought a cheap 1984 to masochistically read again.
> we dont have to give up our powers of seeing the truth
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.
When its "interpreted" in a way that directly contradicts the words themselves then its not an interpretation, its a smokescreen to try and cover up the fact people in power dont want to follow the constitution and are not planning on doing so.
> 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.
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.
Plain language interpretation of constitution is at odds with plain language interpretation of suprem court decisions.
And practical implementation of it all, the rights that you can actual force to have are the third thing.
I wonder if what might save him is he asked for a lawyer before giving the duress PIN, a lawyer might have told him it was a bad idea to do it.
The fact they violated his Miranda rights might get him out of the situation. But he surely should have just kept saying "lawyer" and nothing else.
I'd be surprised. Asking for a lawyer doesn't mean they can't use anything you voluntarily say or do after that against you.
The naivete of some of the comments here is astounding. It doesn't matter whether you're right, it doesn't matter whether it's the law, it's irrelevant that you have rights, etc. Those things are of the past now, for the US.
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.
With all due respect, this is a wild take. Things aren't great in the U.S. right now, but they're not even in the same universe as what the Stasi was doing.
> 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.
It's a very insidious, first you look all over your neighborhood flock cameras Hundreds of them came out of nowhere Nobody fought back .
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
This differentiates the US from who, exactly? If anything, US a latecomer to the public surveillance game.
>This differentiates the US from who, exactly?
What-aboutism is not a very compelling argument.
It kinda is? If people think the US is a Nazi hellhole, while holding up Europe as a model society, it should matter what those counties do.
The former U.S. that was once the freest place on earth.
The US being the 'free-st' place on earth at anytime is quite the misnomer. Sure, you can be 'free' if you are white, wealthy, oh and land owning. Tale as old as time. Sure, you can protest, but many many other countries have far surpassed the US on that one, and have been doing it a whole lot longer.
Hold your horses, segregation was abolished in 1954, not sure US has ever been close from "the freest place on earth".
For the freest place on earth we are super high up on the list of incarcerated per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
As a successful nonwhite person in the US, AbsurdCensor made an infantilizing comment. Non white people have flocked here in droves because of the freedom afforded to anyone to become wealthy. I agree that we are back sliding (tax burden, regulatory burden, political repression, etc.) but it is absurd to make it about race and say that it wasn't once the freest place to start a business and even express yourself.
As long as you were a straight white Christian male, maybe.
Then why are so many non-white, non-Christians still flocking here? Why would anyone want to come to this country if it's such a hellhole?
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.
Why believe historical data? Just go outside and find your own anecdotes.
You mean the typically most oppressed minorities these days, given that you people freak out about these people constantly?
It never was. The US is under as much propaganda as NK they just refuse to recognise it from the inside, which is simply propaganda working.
What time period are you using as an example?
https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png
See: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
You are arguing the slippery slope, which may play out or may not. Instead, argue today, with the facts as they are not as you imagine they will be at some future point.
its only with the benefit of hindsight (and being on the winning side- thus the propaganda was never dispelled) that we consider the stasi and so on the way we do.
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.
> 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.
"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/....
Nobody that I know of in the USA felt compelled to build a giant balloon to fly their family to Canada yet.
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.
We're just not at that stage yet, but we're getting there.
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.
Definitely it can always be worse and I think we need to break ridiculous laws. I know nothing about Mark Bray but that is a ridiculous thing that should adjudicated.
Yeah, I wrote about this on HN before. Americans tend to imagine that WW2 ends and then East Germany immediately puts up a wall and now nobody can leave but it was way more gradual than that. The year the European war ended you could just walk across the border, you'd need to show some ID but you have ID because it was the war and Germans issued everybody with ID in the war. The Allies are manning the borders, they want to arrest Nazis, so ID saying you're a Nazi is a bad idea, but if you're just some farmer from outside Leipzig (so East Germany) you can easily cross. More than a Million people flee West. Are they foolish? You already know the answer.
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.
I sometimes wonder what the tipping point is for people, or whether there actually is one for many.
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.
I think we have to wait for our moment of protest to arrive. We should keep our eyes open for opportunities for civil disobedience.
Imagine the stories the currently ICE-detained could tell. Hunted in the streets like animals and stuck in cages, with no right to due process.
Sure, not as bad. Woohoo.
Be that as it may, observe that the directions are opposite.
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.
Indeed. The rising flood of people feeling East for West Berlin was the very reason for the construction of the Berlin Wall.
As others point out, in the DDR one could not LEAVE. The main reason we have to have large sweeps for people coming here illegally is because administrations other than Obama and Trump turned a blind eye and did little enforcement. The Biden admin went to far as being negligent in their enforcement, so now there is a lot of backlog.
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.
It doesn't bode well for the US to compare itself to others in this regard.
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.
It's less about what they did after arriving and more about border violation itself.
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.
Ah, the law. Did the Stasi break the 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.
Try just walking into Mexico and staying there indefinitely. You'll have it far worse ... they don't play around.
What country does not have immigration laws? We’re not unique in having them nor in enforcing them. Check out Taiwan, China, Singapore, Japan, Egypt, South Africa, Chile, Peru, Canada, etc.
None of those have poorly trained, masked, armed kidnappers snatching people off the streets and shooting their citizens.
None of those are needed for enforcing immigration law. This is a choice, supported by a lot of people who should have known better.
Well, if previous presidencies hadn’t been derelict in their duties (e-verify, timely removals, ineligibility to benefits etc) we would not have been in this pickle. But, especially the Biden admin they _removed_ existing barriers, worked with NGOs to up the numbers of migrants arriving, many ending up illegal, means that there is a large backlog that normally would not need those measures had previous admins not been derelict. In the last 30 years only Obama and Trump enforced immigration laws.
I prefer the Japanese way and the Swiss way. Their citizens come first, foreigners come second. The needs of citizens come before the need for cheap labor. Every job is a decent job. No job is so bad that they can only get illegals to do them.
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).
> 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.
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.
But I consider what the US/UK are doing to be invasive, and if the governments fell I might be proven right (hell, Snowden already proved it over a decade ago- yet here we are).
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.
Is that any different to how African Americans feel about the police? Or how Latinos feel about ICE today?
Soviet era under Stalin was brutal.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
You might not realise it, but you're proving my point to some extent.
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".
We blame the Soviet government for famine, but that’s not necessarily the opinion of people living at the time. Famine tended to occur every ~10 years due to natural weather variability so while 1930-1933 was unusually brutal it was just one of a very long string of famine. For example the Russian famine of 1921–1922 killed 5 million from a drought + WWI. Which was preceded by the famine of 1906-1908 which was preceded by the famine of 1901–1902, though these where less significant.
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.
> With all due respect, this is a wild take. Things aren't great in the U.S. right now, but they're not even in the same universe as what the Stasi was doing.
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.
Winning arguments and solving problems are two different skillsets. And the US Congress is mostly people with the former. Not to say that winning arguments doesn't help when choosing a solution, but it is very different.
Or “To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
> but they're not even in the same universe as what the Stasi was doing
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.
> what the Stasi was doing
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?
If we're trying to find a difference in distinction, that has never been the case in the US. The police I've always been able to surveil and put people in jail.
I mean its so much easier to do stuff the Stasi could only dream of with technology today.
The very big difference to the Stasi is, people back then were really afraid to speak their mind, as there were real consequences fast, for doing things as stating your opinion about ghe government. And not creating attention while saying, I cannot speak up anymore! while speaking up all the time.
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.
There are other big differences in the other direction, though. The Stasi couldn't have dreamed of the manpower efficiency of modern surveillance.
On the other hand, they had on average someone in every appartment block and every company directly reporting to them and doing on request other things. The human touch of spycraft. Nowdays spying on the population is automated.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
-Mark Twain
You'd be surprised.
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.
You're right that the US is not in the same universe as the Stasi was.
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
What makes you qualified and informed of what’s taking place to determine that?
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.
I am pretty sure someone discussing taking people to gas chambers in 1933 would also be called having a wild take. It's where the US is heading.
Fascism marches on in full swing.
> 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.
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.
It just takes a bit of reading about American history to know that we have had authoritarian phases pretty much since our independence. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson policies against freedom of speech, native Americans and international trade, Fillmore and Buchanan fugitive slave act and Dred Scott, Lincoln suspension of Habeas Corpus, Cleveland using the military against unions, Johnson military expansion in Vietnam, Nixon secret bombings and using CIA/FBI against protesters. The nation was heavily polarized during each of these periods as much or more than it is today.
Interesting you say that, because as another Canadian, I would say that the sentiment in our country is the opposite of you describe. The actions of our government reflect it.
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?
The simple answer is we need constitutional reform. Term limits on SCOTUS, codification of norms (eg releasing presidential candidate tax returns, not blocking appointee confirmations indefinitely to steal the position for the next admin), anti corruption laws with teeth. Also things like reigning in the absurd executive power bloat that’s gone on since Lincoln. POTUS was never meant to be a king. There should never be a case where the executive can start a war (conventional, trade or otherwise) without even CONSULTING Congress.
This is all just reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
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.
You are suggesting what you really need is a guillotine?
No. That might be what our current leaders deserve, but it won't fix the problem of grossly dysfunctional governance, particularly at the highest levels. Which makes it just a dangerous (to everyone) waste of effort. (And I do not mean just the current government. The whole kit & kaboodle, going back decades, has comprehensively failed.)
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.
That can't happen from anything short of civil war.
If being an insurrectionist and convicted felon and neck-deep in the Epstein ring wasn't enough to sink the guy, I don't think anyone who voted for him (or anyone who for good or bad reason, abstained) would give a single flying fuck about his tax returns.
What matters is the taxi, not the checkers. Stuff like tax returns is window dressing.
Take him up on his bet then
America dominance on the world is ending, it's a fact. East Asia is at least on par, India is china from 25 years ago.
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.
I'm just not sure what to do. What the US is turning into is incredibly sad and I wish I could leave.
Moving on from being a unipolar power does not necessitate societal collapse. The UK is still around and their empire fell a long time ago.
> 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.
> This nonsense needs to stop. You can’t vote for him again unless he deigns to run for a lower office
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.
His cognitive decline is increasingly evident, his approval rating is the lowest on record (for any president), he ran again last time because it was his best chance to stay out of jail. If he wants a peaceful dotage and doesn't want his legacy torn down, he's better to endorse Don Jr or Marco Rubio and rig the election at the margins if need be.
You keep saying it and it’ll happen. Stop saying it. You give credence to the idea by speaking it into existence. Stop believing and repeating their bullshit and letting them win.
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.
Yes and I caused Jan 6 by calling out my local Rep. in December 2025 for telling his constituents to storm the Capitol and steal back the election. What compromise on this issue are you looking for?
> The UK is still around and their empire fell a long time ago.
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.
American imperialism is well documented. We have military outposts all over the world. Puerto Rico is still in essence a colony.
> 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.
good grief. people said this about the USSR right up until it collapsed. they also said it about Japan. this website is ridiculous. you people know this is an echo chamber, right? go outside
quit being a coward and stop creating new accounts to shit post. Like c'mon man.
Most major industrialized nations have gone through something like this and it usually takes much longer than 10 years to escape and correct.
Your day to day is still pretty much normal. If you turned off the news and never read about Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data [1] you'd just in your head remember there are tens of millions of folks flying, going through customs and border security and all that with 0 issues. What you wrote I think regarding the decade of silliness precisely supports the point, in my opinion.
[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.
You have no real rights when police can kill, maim, or otherwise fuck you up with impunity even when you have done nothing wrong. Philando Castile and others demonstrate this. You may win in court but your life can be fucked up if the police decide to inflict non judicial punishment.
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”?
> You have no real rights when police can kill, maim, or otherwise fuck you up with impunity even when you have done nothing wrong.
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?
That doesn’t mean you have rights. It just means you haven’t yet been targeted.
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.
No, I have rights. Nobody can target me for anything including the police. All you're doing is proving my point about sensationalism.
-edit to your edit-
Black people still have rights even if some cops do some dumb, illegal thing.
> Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data
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.
> As far as federal overreach of power goes, that's pretty inexcusable.
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.
> 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.
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.
> When a house is raided and someone flushes a toilet, can courts assume they flushed drugs, or does that have to be proven?
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.
> then destruction of evidence would be functionally permissible whenever done competently.
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.
> 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.
So it turns out destroying a record to obstruct an investigation is also a crime under 18 U.S. Code § 1519. For that they wouldn't need to prove that it was "evidence" or even that it was relevant.
So as much as I sympathize with the guy a d wabt to cheer him on, he's probably screwed.
I find it interesting that you can’t lie to the police but the police can (and do) lie to you. Why?
I'd generally agree that the police shouldn't be able to lie to a detained suspect, or at least that such deception should be more constrained than it is in the context but, in general, the law as practiced hinges on the question, "does police deception render a detained suspect's confession or statements involuntary?"
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
I disagree. Back then it was all a big secret. Officially the US was pretending.
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.
Despite the normalization of masked federal gunmen kidnapping people based on the color of their skin and the language they speak.... Not even breaking a law in the process, the supreme court legalized racial profiling.
One can just argue about the normalization of people breaking the law by overstaying visas or hopping the border or whatever being the Supreme Court (or whoever you feel like blaming) legalized some other concept that most Americans also find disagreeable.
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.
… 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."
> This illegal shit going on doesn’t affect more than 49.999% of the population so… no big deal.
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.
You are the one who said “doesn’t affect most people”.
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.
> You are the one who said “doesn’t affect most people”.
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.
I feel like drawing an equivalence here is morally dubious
I don’t believe I equated any two things, but if you in fact read my comment that way this comment is now clarifying you and informing you otherwise.
Normal day of a normal person living in dictatorship ... is normal. There are sometimes periods where a lot of people are at risk at the same time, but they pass.
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.
Well, all might be fine, you might be a little obedient drone, not angering your masters, making sure to be apolitical - only to be mobilized & send to die in a ditch in a useless war.
We're not living in a dictatorship or anything close to it. Communist regimes killed tens of millions of people outright. Rather important difference.
Let me channel a person in the communist regime.
"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!"
> 10y later they're richer than ever
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.
Counter point is, throughout history America didn’t have a competition that surpassed it across many standards. Japan got very close, but got contained in some ways. China doesn’t need to play ball.
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 fully expect a new president to be ushered in, whether R or D, and for some level of normalcy to start creeping back.
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.
> I don't think America can lose
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.
> some level of normalcy
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.
"Nothing would fundamentally change." And he meant it.
Yeah, mostly agree but playing devils advocate, PRISM was authorized under bush, implemented under Obama, and is being abused by Trump. Obama promised safeguards, but it’s pretty clear those were just a ruse. It’s only going to get worse. The well deserved controversy around Flock is the perfect example.
I feel like a reversal of authoritarianism is coming but we can't take it for granted.
“Silliness” I have masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles barking orders at US citizens in my neighborhood and zip-tying minors who did nothing but run away and cry. I have neighbors cheering it on. Not silly at all when you see it up close.
If they are masked men in unmarked vehicles, how do you know they’re federal agents? Aren’t they just criminals that you should call the police to stop?
And you have the Attorney General of the United States, and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security saying "it doesn't matter, if they tell you they're federal agents, you need to comply."
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.
Oh give me a break dude.
I'm skeptical that we will have an exchange of power in the next 40 years.
The USSR is a great example: it took 65 years to fall, and the collapse didn't bring it to anything particularly good.
I agree. It's actually quite insulting to other countries whose actual atrocities were measured in lives lost. I voted for Kamala but Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. He's just a loser, he's not even remotely brave enough to be Hitler Jr.
The guy doesn't have the stomach for real totalitarianism. Just populism, corruption, and weakening the country.
> Trump Derangement Syndrome is real
If only I could convey how ridiculous this sounds looking from outside in.
Yes but many who support him and bankroll him do. They use him as a public thermostat to keep upping the heat to see if any of the frogs jump.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is just another word for "describing Trump actions in honest realistic terms rather then whitewashing them".
And considering how right talks about Mandani, Biden, Harris ... it is ridiculous that the derogatory term goes only toward ... people who talk about Trump.
The USA started from and has come back from way worse in the past.
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.
>but the tick-tock has always ticked further towards a freer, more equal, and more equitable society.
This is a popular sentiment, not a statement of historical fact. Arguments both for and against this are credible.
You can make a credible argument that the American society is less free, less equal, and less equitable than it was at its founding?
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.
That wasn’t the claim: it was that the tocks always outpace the ticks.
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.
Exactly. It is a high dimensional space and it depends which sample you select
Income tax did not exist at the time of founding. The freedom to spend freely from the fruits of one's labor has been lost.
I don’t think any reasonable person would think I am claiming that every ‘tick’ makes things better along every possible axis for every possible person. It’s pretty obvious that judging whether America’s ‘ticks’ have been towards ‘a freer, more equal, and more equitable society’ means considering the state of society in aggregate.
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.
Your line of argumentation asserts that freedom has increased over time with allowances for any form of subjugation by the government short of enslavement. I don't doubt that you're making a good faith argument, but it doesn't engage with the real problem of abuse of power and disenfranchisement of the people because no matter how bad it gets for the average citizen it will never be as bad as chattel slavery. It's hard to argue in good faith on a nuanced issue with someone who has a one liner mic drop response to everything.
Do you honestly think that our society was more (or as) equal 200 years ago than it is today?
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.
Life in Nauru today seems much worse than the colonial period
Prior to the enclosure period of English common law, land was assumed to be available to the private use of government subjects. The American West was the same before it was swallowed by the US government. The current situation is provably less free along this dimension. You could argue that this is not important relative to other things (this is a value judgement), or that things done outside of the state are outside of the discussion (this is a a fallacy, a lot of things once outside of the state find themselves inside it today), or you could say that this does not account for intra-community conflict between settlers and natives (this is a straw man)
This defeatism is unhelpful. I'll not simply surrender the country that I love, thanks.
Especially to someone who is unlikely to even be here.
Doing nothing is surrender. So what do you propose people do? What are you doing? Is it effective?
> So what do you propose people do?
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.
> if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era
That's just too ridiculous and absurd for most people to accept, thankfully. I accept reality, not social media narratives.
CBP/FBI could have shot or tortured him or his loved ones after he provided the bad key, but didn't
his rights still did apply and do apply for now at least
I mean ICE could have arrested him and shipped him off to a foreign country too, even if a federal judge orders them not to, too.
Except, while not in this case, they've done exactly that in hundreds of cases at this point.
And to add to that, a very loyal set of voters who will literally vote for more of the same even when it directly and empirically makes their lives worse.
We have unprecedented corruption in the White House but much of the other stuff is not new territory. It’s bad and a regression I hate to see. But we can always improve when the people demand better. The people always have the power, even if they don’t realize it.
For the most part nothing has changed.
I remain hopeful that we will react to this latest test by improving the guardrails again. The current regime does not by any means have the popular support of the citizenry, so there is every reason to expect some backlash and consequences on the other end of this. It'll take years, though, to work through.
It's encouraging to see 80% of Democrats think the DNC needs its leadership replaced.
> The naivete of some of the comments here is astounding > the best you can do from here is speedrun the collapse
Sorry arrogant bitch, it's not gonna happen
> US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era
> 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...
Quite possibly the worst take I’ve ever read on hacker news. “Things are generally bad now so the entire country should roll over and get fucked.” What are you even thinking dude? Maybe take a walk outside or something..
This has been legal since long before Trump, if you don't like it there's laws in motion to ban it you can support, but entering across a border you've been allowed to be searched without a warrant for decades at least. And if you're being searched and then you destroy what they're trying to search... Here you are.
From the article:
“ 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.
Is the actual charge destruction of evidence, or terrorism? Because if it's the former, then it looks a lot like a plausible legal case.
Destruction of evidence. But sounds like they were searching him in the first place under Trump's new counter-terrorism rules.
edit: deleted because political flamewar
Say whatever you want, just don't say it on social media or border control might not let you enter the country the next time
Border control can't stop you from entering the country. Please do not spread misinformation.
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.
Hallelujah!
> The naivete of some of the comments here is astounding
This is HN. https://xkcd.com/538/
The tendency to describe things that are so essentially characteristic of the capitalist imperial core as resembling the Soviet Union is always so funny
The US has it's mid-term elections this november, and it's possible, and even likely, that the Democratic candidates will win overwhealmingly. The Democrats are not a monolith, either, the Democratic Socialists of America political group is the very progressive part of the Democratic party, they are the ones that are not accepting dark money campaign donations. I do not agree with a lot of the unrealistic things that some DSA candidates have said, but those or the candidates that aren't winning the primaries. There is a giant blue tidal wave coming in November. Trump will become nothing more than a lame duck "president", and he'll likely be impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate and the Justice System will probably be the final arbiter of his fate. That's the way I see it. And I never believed I would be saying what I just said, but the fact is that since trump was elected, the democrats have flipped 31 (at last count) formorly Republican held seats, and the republicans have flipped exactly zero seats from democrat to republican. The American People are not their goverment, especially right now, even though that's not how it was meant to be, but I know one thing, they are fed up and enough is enough.
People have no idea. They’re destroying old books. Just like the last time (1), and the time before that (2), and the time before that(3), which were:
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.
I think the best case scenario is that the democrats win sufficient control of congress that they can both stop the legislative agenda (to the extent it even exists) and interfere enough with presidential executive actions that everything stalls until we reach the next presidential election.
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.
> I have exactly zero expectations of real consequences to Trump. He has far too much popular support for that to be realistic.
That's the problem. He has wide support despite gestures around. The thing a latge part of the population supports is _this_. It's not going away. This is the reason that people are bearish on US future.
I agreed with everything you said up until “he’ll be convicted”.
Not a snowflake’s chance in hell unless the DSA metaphorically push the doddering old guard down the stairs.
In law school we skipped border search cases because the border crosser cases can basically be summed up with “you have no right to privacy at the border.” This has been the common law for 5000 years. It has nothing to do with Trump, or cell phones, or anything other than the notion that a sovereign has an absolute right to know what is crossing its borders.
English Common Law hasn't existed for 5,000 years, which is what the American judicial system is based on.
unclear as to where you got this number
Not OP but generally states are considered to be a central political organization that maintains a monopoly on violence within a defined area.
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.
It's been this way in the UK for years now. Always interesting to hear how far the rest of the West the US is.
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.
i remember when hacker news was full of hackers. that persona is dead now.
It’s always been tech bros and wanna be tech bros.
> I'm so very sorry, but the best you can do from here is speedrun the collapse.
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.
We should probably be thankful that this crew is so incompetent. They could far more lasting damage if they had a clue.
>Those things are of the past now, for the US.
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.
Tens of millions have voted for this 3 times in the past 10 years, it succeeded twice. This is not going away, half the voting population of the US wants to live under authoritarian rule and will do anything to take the whole country with them.
I think if I lived in a truly authoritarian country I'd be a bit taken aback to have my situation equated to that of Americans'.
Only because you think authoritarian means poor.
Yes Americans do not understand how lucky they are.
Republicans are in every way trying to turn this into an authoritarian hellhole. "Cruelty is the point" is a phrase used with regards to right-wing politics in America. We're heading in the worst direction possible, but it takes a bit longer and more work to get a country the size of America with different states to become fully authoritarian. It doesn't happen overnight like it can in small countries.
Voter preferences can change with time, as voters observe the effects of their previous selections. Most voters don't want and didn't vote for authoritarian rule. They are humans with many diverse challenges & concerns in their lives. Their votes are an attempt to balance/compromise among those.
Yet after Jan 6th more people voted or Trump than voted for the Harris
The US wanted this.
Only a small part, maybe 1/3 of the US wanted this. Not the whole population. Sadly 1/3 of eligible voters don't vote - they are the ones who didn't want this but don't have enough sense to vote, and that's different than wanting trump.
Voters change their mind all the time. Sure, there are still plenty in the US who want all this, but Trump's approval ratings are at or near all-time lows, and at least some people who voted for him finally see his lies for what they are, and have regrets.
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.
I take some solace for how there is such a hard floor of support for Trump. Counterintuitively, I consider that good news. Because any regular politician would be so far underwater at this point that they might well fear for their life. What Trump has is a solid 1/3 of the population that are so far up his ass they can't see daylight. That works out great for him, and poorly for every other GOP politician. He's achieved demagogue status, which is easier said than done. Vance ain't got it, Rubio ain't got it, there's not really anybody on the sidelines who looks like they may have it either. So when Trump is gone, the GOP is going to undergo another wild gyration in ideology after the infighting settles down. And if they don't find another halfway plausible demagogue, they might be a back into minority party status for the next two decades. There is precedent for this.
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.
You can rage against Trump and republicans as much as you want but in the end the democrats must learn to formulate why anybody should vote FOR them. Even in the current chaos they aren’t able to bring up a coherent message and follow through when they are in power. I see the same in Germany. AfD is getting stronger while the established parties get nothing done.
It reminds me somewhat of the state of the Weimar Republic. The democratic parties failed which gave an opening to the nazis.
Somehow, no one votes for nazi because they believe that stuff. Rhetorically. They are always victims with no agency.
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.
The Democratic party started, fought, and lost a culture war almost before Republicans even responded. They alienated their voters. Heritage Foundation didn't need to do anything. And fringe groups got more ammo.
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.
You don't give Trump enough credit. It is about him personally, this is not the big win for the heritage foundation that you portray it as.
>half the voting population of the US wants to live under authoritarian rule
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.
Yep if Kent State happened today half of America would be cheering.
A third of America was cheering back then. The attitudes that brought us Trumpism go back many generations.
Does anyone on the other side have a credible plan to undo the damage?
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?
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-reconstruction-papers/ is explicitly aiming to be a Project 2028 book for the left.
That's the thing that worries me. The Democratic party just doesn't have their shit together in that way. They absolutely should be developing this sort of plan. I expect there is some plan, but I doubt it's as comprehensive or in-depth as Project 2025. And it needs to be.
On a long enough timeline, nothing is permanent. The question is how long it lasts and how bad it gets before it gets better.
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.
The people want this administration and their right-wing politics gone, and the right-wing knows it - if the people really wanted the current shitstorm to continue the right-wing wouldn't be so desperate to suppress the vote, gerrymander like madmen, and use every questionable lever to prevent people to vote like trying to extinguish all mail-in voting, etc.
I'm sure a big group of people want that, but I wouldn't call it "the people" when the president has a ~38% approval rating. That's low enough to lose an election but still way too high for me to be comfortable with it. And "the people" have extremely short memories, as we saw last time around.
> 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.
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?
You don't need to go to other countries to play your fears, lest we forget our constitution is a pro-slavery document and one of the first acts of congress was the fugitive slave laws.
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.
Would he have been better off just refusing to give a code?
Yes. They'd probably have kept the device for a while, but he wouldn't be in legal trouble.
Not to sound like a contrarian, but no. They would have thrown it in a faraday bag, cloned the device, and then would use one of the many existing forensic tools available to crack the pin.
https://cellebrite.com/en/blog/the-access-gap-is-closed-what...
https://www.magnetforensics.com/graykey-for-android-devices/
That's crazy. Here in the UK border police can question you for any reason (no need for suspicion) and if you refuse to answer questions or give them access to your devices you'll be charged under terror legalisation.
Even if you are a citizen of the UK?
You’ll be charged, but will they be able to get a conviction?
The charges are the punishment. You are imprisoned, risk losing your career, risk losing reputation, and still have to hire a lawyer. The costs are incredibly asymmetric. This leads to the majority of people complying, which only emboldens the state.
How did it end up, because it’s not a new thing to happen. First time I read about this guy’s border crossing case was few months ago and was of course very much highlighted for the level of surveillance govs can do.. but I also read some Time later that by the letter of law he was not proven wrongdoing.
Are we still discussing a border crossing case that is long historic or there is still an active drama for this guy going on?
Goes to show that he should have made an LLM do it instead.
I don't know about you, but don't people use encryption to retain privacy? And are people still free to manage their personal information? Doesn't a duress PIN present that information in its intended form? I'm confused.
How does it work for China and Russia?
You unlock your phone or they unlock your jaw, then your fingers, then your knees, etc.
Obstruction to what? Also thought this would be covered by the fourth and fifth amendment.
He's lucky they didn't ship him right off to the Dilley Detention Center
But what did Mr. Tunick had to hide tho im serious what did he have (illegal?) that he chose to delete it??
i dont think it was ideological....
i bring a new device just for traveling and wireguard rdp (iphone mirror) into my home desktop
Ah yes, if he was innocent he would have nothing to hide.
Would you care to post screenshots of your inboxes and browser history for the class?
99% of ppl would not hesitate than risk detainment
> 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
99% of people also have an email service that will turn over your entire inbox if required by law.
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.
you really have to go out of your way to figure out how to install graphene and on top of that you have duress code and its pretty much painting a red target on yourself across borders
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.
Well wiping isn't just cause for suspicion, it's actually destroying evidence. He was charged with that, but they couldn't charge him with domestic terrorism. He also had the option to decline unlocking the phone.
The difference is that this guy gave a code that wiped the device while it was under investigation. That's obstruction.
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.
To anyone worried, it doesn't matter how many felonies you get -- you can still be president one day.
Why American authorities are always attacking their citizens freedom?
i think it's just that the American population is the last bunch who gives a damn about it, and the pockets of resistance still makes the news... the same happens mostly everywhere else, just without much complaints.
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).
Since there are zero devices that are released that don’t indicate recording, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to outlaw modification of recording equipment to hide recording.
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.
right, it's just Hungary... in Germany you must ask for permission from the military to leave the country for more than 3 months.
Technology is becoming too significant an existential threat to all governments. IMO, this is the "animal lashing out when backed into a corner" stage of their arc. All of the bills are coming due and they're having to answer for them.
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.
> Technology is becoming too significant an existential threat to all governments. IMO, this is the "animal lashing out when backed into a corner" stage of their arc. All of the bills are coming due and they're having to answer for them.
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.
You're not being ignorant; it's a pretty abstract line of reasoning, I'll admit.
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."
It's not just America. It's many countries.
UK is same.
I know surveillance is on par in the UK, but is the UK also building and populating massive detention centers where people are kept without due process*? Are they flooding the streets of liberal cities with soldiers*? Killing citizens on the streets of liberal states (Minnesota) out in the open? Has nationalism completely overtaken the government and citizenship? Has the opposition party been completely neutered? Does your leader openly break any laws of their choosing while plundering national coffers?
*https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-family-120-days-...
*https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/20/...
Not yet, but Elon Musk is doing his best to get similar types elected in UK.
Law enforcement are underpaid, overworked, and they aren't even respected anymore. A lot are fine, but a lot of people are ending up there because they can't get any other job [1]. I don't think these attacks on freedom are always malicious, I think a lot of it is people in law enforcement who aren't capable of understanding the not-so-subtle difference between "law enforcement" and "law authority".
[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.
So far as I can tell --- and someone challenged me on this recently, saying they'd been in court over a case related to it, so take this with a small grain of salt --- this "too high IQ" thing happened once, in New London CT, and if that's really the only documented case you have to wonder whether it wasn't just New London making an excuse for why they didn't hire someone they just didn't like the vibes of. I can say with assurance that there's no "IQ cap" in cop hiring around here; there's a standardized assessment, and there's no score cap on it.
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.
This is a bit worse than that. They're specifically targeting this guy because they don't like his politics, an act that is unconstitutional, but Trump and his administration has had contempt for the constitution since day one.
Republicans might as well rename their party the Democratic Fascists of America at this point.
> Republicans might as well rename their party the Democratic Fascists of America at this point.
I'm reading Stefan Zweig right now, he was a prolific Jewish author from 1890s until his suicide in 1942, living as an exiled Jew from Austria in South America. He has written many words, over a century ago, that would support your claim.
Next they'll be demanding the passwords to your dropbox and onedrive, because you "might have uploaded something from your phone before re-entering the country". Bet on it.
What about none citizens? Customs kicks you out or throws you into a camp first.
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.
That famous phrase from the constitution, "all men are created equal, except the ones not born in America"
The original you're riffing on is from the Declaration of Independence (a purely rhetorical document), not the Constitution of a decade later.
The implicit "men born outside the US are not men" is arguable worse.
Apparently they can be women. /s
The constitution says it is written to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", actually.
So non-citizens should avoid visiting US. Got it
That has been the case for a long while. I used to travel a lot for work - Serbia, Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, Australia, NZ, Qatar, Kuwait, Moldova - but the only unpleasantness I received at a border/intl airport was on landing in the US, twice; NY both times. Talk about rude and aggressive, for no reason at all. I'm from the UK, by the way.
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.
While I think it's an abuse of power from a moral point of view - yes, that would be the expected legal outcome. Under any administration.
You can refuse to hand over access. You can't go torch evidence. Caught Ollie North as well.
I always bring two phones when I travel, sometimes more than two, mostly because I’m a mobile engineer so I need devices to test apps on, but also just in case of situation like this.
What I don't understand is if he just didn't give any password, he would have been fine. It's only because he gave him a duress pin that he's in trouble.
So, in both cases the government wouldn't have access to the contents of the phone
They might have a way to gain access anyway. That was that case where the FBI got the locked iPhone 5C of a San Bernardino shooter suspect. Apple refused to unlock it, so the FBI paid a hacking firm to do it. If there's no known vuln to get into a phone today, I wonder if they'd hold onto it in hopes that one shows up later.
In the first case they (the US govmnt) could hold him (the citizen) in contempt (in a cell) indefinitely.
That’s false. Maybe a few hours but that’s it. The CBP are expressly not allowed to deny citizens entry into the US.
18 months is, by precedent, the limit on contempt for refusal to decrypt[0], but this administration is happy to disregard any precedent that does not agree with them.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...
Actually no, they are required to allow you to enter the country, but they will make it a hassle, to the point of dehydrating you and/or refusing bathroom access, and confiscate the device in the end and access is through other technical means.
Is that allowed? Can you refuse to give a pin when asked?
It's complicated.
> 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.
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/can-border-agen...
We can only hope that it eventually gets decided that there can be no such thing as destroying evidence before a judge has initiated the discovery phase of a proceeding, outside of any standing operational requirements like business records.
Well hopefully there’s a jury so this nonsense can get nullified
Would it be permissible to wipe your phone before going through customs to get back into the US? If they ask to search your already wiped phone, you aren’t destroying any evidence.
There are apparently problems with wipe/restore under GrapheneOS:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780>
(From the HN GrapheneOS account about a month ago.)
It has an encrypted backup/restore system.
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.
Thank you!
(Very much appreciate your active participation here.)
That link says you can't take a image of the disk prior to wiping.
OP is talking about just backing up what you need off-phone and then wiping it.
What problems are you referring to?
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394193>
Yes. Of course it is permissible. It is your device. The wipe must have completed before arriving at the counter.
I wouldn't assume that to be the case. It's illegal under federal law to destroy evidence of a crime. Just what the government needs to do to show that you've destroyed evidence of a crime and not just the sexting you did with your girlfriend is a pretty murky area of law, from what I can tell.
I would not present a phone to customs that had clearly just been wiped.
You're speaking nonsense since there was no charge or warrant against him. There was no crime that was committed. People are free to use their phone for f sake. People who reason as poorly as you will lead to all remaining rights being lost.
The way he wiped it is legal for the same reason. It was an illegal search and he was under no obligation to preserve the data on his phone.
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.
Ah, I see where you've gone wrong. You're expecting to apply common sense and reason to the law.
That kind of thinking has landed a whole lot of people in prison.
You're losing track of the discussion which was about erasing data before arriving at the counter. In any event, if you're so willing to "bend over" to the man, please try not to take others down with you.
I did not, in fact, lose track of that point. I was merely pointing out it's not a solution. I'm sure the guy in the topic article thought he had things figured out, too.
You know how they say ignorance of the law is no excuse? That holds true even if the law seems unreasonable or incomprehensible.
What about everyone does this at the border. Then what is normalized is deleting your encryption key while entering, they won’t prosecute everyone on their baseless prosecutions. Join in I say, there is no law being broken only scare tactics being applied to prevent this kind of thing. Normalize the act not the consequences.
So we're presumed guilty until proven otherwise (the presumption is, any data we delete must be illegal; couldn't possibly be nude selfies that the government has no right to see)
Paywalled, but what is the actual charge? Is it some extremely generic "obstructing an investigation" one? The US is quite good about making court documents available on line, if someone can find it.
The article says he was charged with obstruction.
You can try this "gift link" to the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/politics/samuel-tunick...
He is charged with obstruction, but under domestic terrorism (as defined by a national security presidential memorandum).
But republicans assured me that they wouldn't ever start throwing around domestic terrorism at democrats!
"In May 2022 the corporate offices of Brasfield & Gorrie in Birmingham, Alabama were vandalized, and the message "Drop Cop City Or Else" was spray-painted on the building."
"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
The gift link shows only a fraction of the article text. Just stick to https://archive.is/SflVC.
Obstruction to what though?
Injustice ;)
Illegitimate abuse of border control power to restrict freedom of speech.
Knowingly providing a PIN that would erase evidence is going to get tough in court.
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.
There is no duty to keep a copy of messages and private data on your phone for the FBI to peruse at its leisure. Quite the opposite, actually (according to the constitution).
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.
Evidence of what?
Whatever they claimed they needed access for his phone to. Probably nothing serious that would be worth more than a fine, if anything. But now they've got him for deleting evidence, which is pretty bad.
> if anything
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.
There is no "evidence"; by any reasonable interpretation of that word there would have to be an actual accusation of crime for there to be evidence of one. This was a search predicated on literally no actual basis apart from "we have the right to search your device because we have ultimate power at border passings", essentially just a fishing expedition.
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".
How can they prove that? What if it was a glitch?
That shouldn't be too hard. Get someone from Google or someone with any tech knowledge to explain to the judge how phones normally work, what encryption keys are, the implications of wiping an encryption key, and then get someone to show the difference between entering a normal PIN wrong several times and entering the duress PIN. You just need to convince the jury (or judge, if there is no jury for whatever reason).
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.
Right, the halting problem means one can hardly prove anything at all when it comes to software.
Sure buddy. And the uncertainty principle means you can't prove I was at the scene of the crime.
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.
No, it means there is no general solution to the problem of proving software correct. You can prove if a specific program will halt or not given certain parameters. You cannot write an algorithm that will work to prove if any arbitrary program will halt.
> They were going to catch him for something, some day. This incident just provided the necessary excuse to lock him up
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 ...
China is strictly worse than the USA when it comes to border controls. That doesn't mean the USA is good or acceptable in any way; these laws are part of the reason why I don't plan on visiting the country. The USA also has much worse laws on the books, like having to give the authorities your social media passwords to check if you're secretly a terrorist (though that doesn't apply to citizens).
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".
FWIW the 100 mile airport border zone thing has been debunked, as the 100 mile zone by statute applies only to land and maritime borders. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
China is indeed "bad" for the gestapo shit. The difference is that China's gestapo shit comes with benefits for the common man too, whereas in the US the gestapo shit only serves the inner circle at the top of the regime with zero benefits to 99% of the populace.
Kindly list here the most important 3 benefits "for the common man" that accompany "China's Gestapo shit".
The right to work 996, obviously!
Here's a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/politics/samuel-tunick...
Paywall/archive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49387289>
yikes
Ok those who see no problem... Let's just for the sake of argument concede that you have never had any right to privacy while crossing the border and so there is no cause for outrage here. Guy did it to himself.
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.
amatuer... when you leave the us you bring a wiped phone, never bring your primary phone/laptop/camera/etc
Anyone that is surprised by this or somehow thinks this is new clearly hasn't crossed the border a whole lot. I grew up in a city along the US/Canada border. You don't fuck around with US Customs (or Canadian) agents. My cousin (not always so friendly) pissed off a US Customs agent (in the 90s mind you) and they promptly took his car and disassembled much of it looking for non-existent drugs. When they put it back together it was never the same. Their job is to be suspicious, 99.999% of the time people are completely innocent. But let 1 bad person through and it's Customs' fault for whatever bad thing they do. Not an easy job. Not an excuse for how they can misbehave either.
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.
I left this comment 2 weeks ago on a youtube short on the subject:
"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.
Isn't that an illegal law though? After all you are not required to aid in the prosecution against yourself, aka you don't have to incriminate yourself. So such a law means that the courts now ignore that law/amendment. Doesn't this make it illegal on this point alone?
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.
One more reason to not go to the US
Yet another case that will waste the court's time and money. All this is doing is keeping defense lawyers pocket's lined.
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.
Oh, they may well give you bad time if your phone looks like a burner with too little content.
> Oh, they may well give you bad time if your phone looks like a burner with too little content.
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.
Exactly, these people making shit up about border crossings are either doing so in bad faith or haven’t done a lot of international business travel.
This is not... advice. But if anyone's actually going to do this, the method that's worked for me...
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.
If you are a citizen it doesn’t matter. They have to let you in.
According to this admin due process is only for citizens, and since we’ve claimed you aren’t a citizen you have no due process to prove otherwise.
So what, don’t do anything to protect yourself because there’s no hope? Give up?
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.
Wouldn’t be the first time the US government grossly abused its own citizens and violated their rights
And yet this distant possibility doesn’t seem to happen very often to citizens, as long as we still have courts. Not that actual abuses should be trivialized.
This comes across as fearmongering to keep people from protecting themselves.
If you are a citizen like this person is then you can tell them to fuck off, they can keep the phone, and they have to let you in.
They have to let you in. Doesn't mean they have to let you roam the country freely. They can just send you to some form of detention.
They can hold you for a few hours while they investigate, but they can't just arbitrarily detain you without a legal basis.
That isn’t true. They can detain you briefly for questioning at the border, but if there is no crime then you will be released. Feel free to dig into historical court cases about border detention if you disagree.
If you get charged with a crime, things are very different.
Nope, no disagreement. I just see your take as very optimistic.
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.
If the abuse is egregious, you have a decent chance of pro bono representation or a lawsuit payout. In any case, activism comes with personal risk, and part of activism is accepting that risk while attempting to protect others. (This person was an activist, and it’s likely that they wanted to confine the damage to themselves.)
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.
> I'd wager that's a good way to land an obstruction charge.
What are you even on about? Having a blank phone is obstruction?
They won't unless you are already on "their list" My phone basically looks like a burner phone, I do not use social media, do not install apps, my iphone fits (with room to spare) all "apps" on a "single page." I just call and text from my phone and have a browser and maps and that is basically it.
Think it’s better to travel without a phone at all and buy one when arriving in the us? Problematic I guess with everything being digital
Years ago I chatted with a border guard from another country about their job (while they were not working). Not having a phone nowadays would be considered "strange" enough to flag you. If you're not a citizen of said country, it could even dramatically increase the odds of disallowing you entry. Often this would prevent you returning for a set number of years.
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.
The last time I tried to do that on a trip to Germany, admittedly many years ago, I found I could not get phone service without a local address.
If you can, just avoid ever entering the US at all.
It has been standard practice for some time now in some European companies.
I'm a bit mystified why anyone would bring an electronic device over an international border with anything that could be construed, fairly or not, as evidence of criminal behavior.
Also, you might accidentally drop your burner in the lake/ocean before you return. It happens!
> At this point, people should buy a burner phone when going to/from the US.
At this point? This has been standard practice for a while now.
I don't agree with all this and this increasingly fascist regime but... this was the most predictable outcome. Consider these two scenarios.
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 court has not yet determined whether the use of the duress PIN/password was legal. There's definitely no consensus among legal experts of it being illegal as you're portraying it. The US has strong legal protections against self-incrimination and unreasonable searches despite erosion of how much people's rights are respected.
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.
> 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.
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.
I used a very specific word for a very specific reason. That word was "spoliation". It is a legal word. It means destroying evidence but it means more than that.
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.
If the government wants you no amount of technical gotchas will prevent this.
They didn't get the data from his phone and will likely lose the case against him. They probably wanted data to go after other people and those people were protected against it.
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.
And you still believe you have more freedom than China and Russia.. *thumbs up emoji*
Well, yes. Imagine responding like this guy in Chinese border control, or even UK. The 1A, 4A, 5A mentioned here don't exist.
You mean the Chinese who use NK slave labor at their logging camps near the NK border? Is that the China that is more free?
SO you have an issue with prison labor? As an American?
Y'know, makes me wonder why Democrates didn't disband ICE and CBP when they had control over the Congress and the government. I mean, they knew those agencies would be used in precisely this way, yet did nothing anyhow.
Democrats built the blueprint for ICE's deportation program and architected the law that enabled it.
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.
IIRIRA was not a 'Clinton' bill. It was initially drafted by Lamar Smith (r) of Texas (HR 2202) and subsequently attached to an appropriations bill (HR 2610), and passed with a bipartisan veto-proof majority.
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.
Huh? He signed it and evangelized it heavily, speaking about his strong support for the bill.
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.