He was also denied a lawyer 4 times. Fuck the police.
The motion also states that Tunick asked four times to speak with a lawyer and was denied each time.
What? You don’t have a right to a lawyer now? Man that country just doesn’t know how to do anything right
Tunick’s legal team is now trying to have the evidence thrown out. It argues that he was questioned without being read his Miranda rights, that agents repeatedly refused his requests to speak with a lawyer, and that the phone search was an unreasonable seizure.
So who’s really in the wrong here?
As a guy who knows nothing about the laws here:
If those were cops, that search and seizure would be completely illegal and they would get laughed out of court. You can’t force someone to give you their password.
Now these were border people. That part of the american justice system seems already pretty lawless. Whether or not they are allowed to do what they did will be a central part of the case.
Also they pressured him to give them the code to unlock the phone and seemingly typed it in themselves. So maybe you can argue that it was their fault for not researching GrapheneOS and they destroyed the evidence.
This whole thing seems stupid and about some power tripping border-guards.
I doubt this is going to go to court. They wouldn’t want to risk setting a precedent with a small fry like him.
Watch them drive it all the way up to the supreme court and suddenly encrypted drives are illegal for civilians or some dumb shit like that XD
A feature like this is more about keeping others safe my destroying your communications with them. I wonder how good GrapheneOS is about educating their users.
This is also not a conviction right? They are just drumming up all charges they can think of.
Can’t speak on the second half of this; but GrapheneOS in light of this have outlined their security in a post to the community. I would argue their education of their user base is there.
You surely mean the fascist government needs no pretext to put a man in prison.
Won’t be long I feel before the same charge is levied on someone that wiped their phone hours before going through security.
Interesting, I had wondered if/when we’d get a story like this. It seems kind of crazy to me that this guy chose to wipe it in the airport instead of before traveling, particularly if the US actually has laws that allows it to prosecute him in this scenario.
We don’t actually have laws that completely apply here, so this is essentially a test balloon / attempt to set precedent. The guy was specifically targeted by CPB due to his past protest of a thing called cop city in Atlanta, he was added to a watchlist with no notification to him, and CPB told him this was a routine secondary screening and that they wanted to search his phone for “child pornography”. Certainly would be better to have a burner or pre-wiped phone but basically I think he was caught unaware coming back from an unrelated trip.
In any case majority of Americans do not expect to have to offer up their digital systems freely outside of warrant-compulsion, which was not in play here.
That said there’s a lot of twisted loopholes they’re trying to use lately like this, so unfortunately even if it’s not the law they may be able to make it the law via this kind of precedent setting.
It’s not an issue of him ever thinking of choosing to wipe it during his travel, he clearly had no initial intent of doing so, which is why he didn’t do it before departing . What’s caused all the legal issues is that he decided to give his duress pin when his actual pin was demanded by the US border guards. The border guards entering that pin caused the device to reboot and factory reset. That’s why he’s in trouble. They’re claiming he purposefully caused evidence to be destroyed when an investigation was already underway.
It’s not that crazy. Do you wipe your phone every time you travel? It’s the most secure but least convenient option.
I don’t travel overseas often, so yes - I probably would wipe it the next time. Restoring from a backup is pretty quick and easy these days, so I would feel comfortable leaving it in a barebones state until clearing customs and border security.
But I also don’t use GrapheneOS, nor would I ever use the duress PIN feature. I expect people using both to take their privacy and security more seriously than me and be willing to take the extra precautions rather than emergency wiping at the last minute when things go wrong. I feel like it’s pretty dumb to be an anti-cop political activist in the US at the moment with GrapheneOS on your phone and then not look into or think about any of this stuff beforehand.
if the US actually has laws that allows it to prosecute him in this scenario.
Big if.
Experts said the legal approach is unusual and may be the first time the law has been aimed at an operating system. “It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.
