Technology

The headline is wrong.

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

There, fixed.

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

Land of the "free"...

Guys don't travel to fascist countries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a shithole

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

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

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

Why would you not just take a secondary (read: wiped) phone going somewhere problematic instead of relying on features like this? You know US border security under Trump plays fast and loose with your rights.

Maybe somebody's asked this already but how come, in this day and age, there isn't a way to snapshot your entire phone into some sort of encrypted blob for storage in a location of your choice? You could wipe your phone and setup a throwaway profile with some basic apps before traveling, and then restore the snapshot once safely through customs.

Border issues aside, it would be very handy to be able to snapshot a phone like that anyway...

I hope he sues the agent for wiping his data.