- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Advice: if you know you don´t want your phone searched going through customs, don’t bring it! Or wipe it before you go through. I’m 100% on this guy’s side, but we’re not exactly living in a free and open society.
This isn’t new. Journalists coming into the US in the aughts would be harassed by CBT and DHS, forced to open and unlock their laptops (and then delete whatever the officers found unsavory.
So they’d come in with their computers fully encrypted and wouldn’t have the pass key, themselves, so it was impossible to unlock them. If they were detained unreasonably, that became a new story the next morning.
Once through customs, correspondents would call their office and get the key.
But it sucks if you don’t have a whole news agency to back your rights.
Interesting. Could they hold the device, though, until it’s unlocked? I think this might be the Bad Press exception, not a legal right that would work for anyone else. Because if I gave the encryption key to a friend, they would just tell me to call the friend and get it… and if they refused to give it to me, it would because I instructed them not to…
No, they would just refuse you entry to the country.
Yes, if you’re not a citizen they can do that. If you are a citizen, they can not deny you entry.
If you are a citizen, they can not deny you entry.
But they can detain you at the border
Yeah, and in a very cold room and for a very long time. But legally they have to let you in at some point.
Seriously. Wipe it, claim it’s new to you or whatever, put your stuff back on later if you need to. I’m sure you can find somewhere or someone you trust to get you that data back whenever you actually need it.
It brings up an interesting question: if wiping your phone after being requested access to it is illegal (?), would wiping your phone in anticipation of access being requested also illegal? Are we effectively required to give the federal government access to every private account in order to travel?
My understanding is that if you knew a search was going to happen, it’s illegal. But good luck proving that you knew it would happen.
I think you might be thinking of spoilation–https://civilprocedure.uslegal.com/discovery/spoliation-of-evidence/ --which is destroying evidence you think might be subpoened. I don’t think it would apply in this scenario.
Your linked source only applies to civil matters (think lawsuits for a slip and fall). It even says:
Under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 37
That basically arises out of the Fifth Amendment, which reads:
No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
In the criminal conrext, the Fourth Amendment rules, which reads:
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.
All that “probable cause”, “stop and frisk”, and “reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing” stuff arises from the “unreasonable searches and seizures” bit.
Your linked source only applies to civil matters (think lawsuits for a slip and fall).
Yes.
This was a custodial search by a police force, so civil procedure doesn’t apply.
As long as you aren’t doing it during an active investigation, no it wouldn’t be illegal. That’s the problem. Guy thought he was sneaky, and got busted. If you come in to investigate and suddenly you are deleting all the records, you are going to have a serious problem.
In the regular world, you can delete something to keep the cops from knowing about it as long as it’s not covering up a crime. You won’t find a charge of “destruction of evidence” without an investigation of an explicit crime with probable cause.
If they had probable cause to search his phone, they would have used it when he was in Georgia, not waited for him at the airport where he had fewer rights.
deleted by creator
I’m replying to what I’m designating as the duplicate comment.
You know, since we are entering into a lot of legal weirdness here, how about this:
You give the cops TWO passwords. You tell them one is the duress password, and the other is the password that will unlock the phone.
Desperate and without a warrant, they try one. Wrong try! Phone is wiped.
In reality, both are duress passwords but they would have to prove that. (GoS only currently supports one duress password)
Yes, it’s ridiculous, but everything about this is ridiculous.
Nah, write the duress password on a piece of paper and keep it in your phone case. Then keep your mouth shut. Let the cops find it and try it themselves.
Then you sue them for destroying your data. They took your phone and wiped it…
Yes! Or even better, make it 1234 or your birthdate and let them guess it on their own.
I have two different PINs I use for different debit cards. One of those is also my phone PIN, the other is my Duress PIN.
It would be really easy for to forget which is which when in a stressful situation.
This is actually a really good idea. It would also work if your phone got stolen.
aand it would make the stolen phone ready to use by the thief, because I guess graphene os does not implement factory reset protection, because that traditionally relies on login to a google account
The guy in the story we’re discussing found a way to make a duress password work using graphene.
“found a way” it is a feature, you can set it up in the settings. there is not much figuring out in that. but if you turn that on, and your phone legitimately gets stolen, now the thief can sell it for good money, because it is still usable. there is no easy toggle for that in the settings.
Well yeah the thief can sell the hardware, but the data is wiped. Not expecting it to be a self destruct feature.
my point is this feature does not work that well against actual petty thieves, because all other phones actively disincentivize phone theft by making it very hard or impossible to make usable without access to the owner’s real account, and this one doesn’t. if you as a thief know that a pixel phone runs grapheneos, it is more valuable than others because you know you can just wipe it and it is usable again.
Labeled “phone password” for good measure.
Nope. Now it’s intentionally misleading. You don’t want that.
And what about maybe also adding in a friend or relative that’s with you so that you can inform the cop that one of you tells only truths and one of you tells only lies. I think we’re onto something here. ‘Dispatch, I’m gonna need the Riddlemaster to come down here. We got another one.’
Yup, you’re ok if they use the rubber hose. They likely need to produce you again at some point. If they use the wrench, they don’t care what you look like.
It pretty much makes privacy illegal.
I think what he did was brave and I think there’s a good chance he loses this, and I think the guilty verdict will be really unpopular
Jury nullification is a thing for reason.
Someone has to fall on their sword to get important issues brought before the supreme court but I wouldn’t get my hopes up with this court.
I’m inclined to think he’s going to get away with it, but more because of the circumstances under which he provided the password, as in prolonged detention where he was specifically denied access to a lawyer.
That would (very pleasantly) surprise me in the current political climate
There’s an easy legal loophole.
When you seize their phone, tell them your passcode is explicitly not the destruction code, and do not answer any more questions besides insisting this.
When they inevitability try to put in the only thing you mentioned, its entirely their fault for the erase.
Your milage may vary depending on financial class.
When you seize their phone, tell them your passcode is explicitly not the destruction code, and do not answer any more questions besides insisting this.
I feel like there might be a couple of things you have the the wrong way around in this sentence.
The destruction code: 4321
“Well, the code definitely isn’t 4321”
Exactly.
What if we just say I always forget the code and use the built-in too many tries wipes the data setting?
If you forgot the code can you offer to let them have it? Then you could wipe it remotely?
Trying to understand what would happen if you really forgot the passcode.
what would happen if you really forgot the passcode
I believe the threat here was: Tell us the access code or we confiscate your phone, which we’ll hack into at our leisure.
Unless you suffered some traumatic brain injury, nobody is going to believe you can’t unlock your phone after being in detention for 24 hours.
It would probably be treated as an intentional wipe.
Perhaps the trauma of being in detention made you unable to remember it? It’s really up to the prosecution/accusers to prove it, isn’t it?
Don’t lie, just don’t talk.
In that case, you can argue you gave the duress password by accident, too.
There’s already precedent that you cannot be forced to give up your passwords. It’s a 5th amendment violation. But I’m not sure if it applies to this case or not.
Yeah, there’s reading the bill of rights, understanding what it means and how it was intended, and it’s another thing to understand how it’s been thoroughly chipped away at, year by year, state by state, decision by decision. You would legitimately be shocked and horrified at how many exceptions there are, and this MAY fall within one of them the–the border exception.
Just don’t provide it.
always use a burner phone, burner accounts when doing something like this.
