Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

techspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 1001 posts

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#41

Post by gruez »

Guvante wrote: post #24
gruez wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How are they going to prove there was evidence of a crime? They don't have to, only that you destroyed evidence. That's why many people get prosecuted with "obstruction of justice" rather than the actual crime. >While destruction of potential evidence does introduce a certain amount of leeway that doesn't allow going from absolutely nothing to "evidence was on the wiped device". So if someone was doing insider tradi…

They need to prove you destroyed evidence, you have the mens rea component with the deceptive pin code but the defense can simply plainly say they didn't want the police to read their private device. Your example is fabricated since the justice department didn't even bring forward a specific crime they believe was committed here. If they charged him with a crime and had evidence his device had evidence of that crime…

>with the deceptive pin code but the defense can simply plainly say they didn't want the police to read their private device.

That's as convincing as saying you burned all the documents because you don't want people who break in to read all your financial records. It just happened to start after the SEC came knocking

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#42

Post by gruez »

fluidcruft wrote: post #15
gruez wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How are they going to prove there was evidence of a crime? They don't have to, only that you destroyed evidence. That's why many people get prosecuted with "obstruction of justice" rather than the actual crime. >While destruction of potential evidence does introduce a certain amount of leeway that doesn't allow going from absolutely nothing to "evidence was on the wiped device". So if someone was doing insider tradi…

Destroyed evidence of what?

Destroyed materials that might be relevant to an investigation that you know exists.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#43

Post by greyface- »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #19
teravor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this will likely fail as block devices aren't dumb anymore, the firmware state will out the hidden volume. counting on the laziness/unsophistication of an adversary isn't a great move. this problem may be solvable by a purpose-built abstraction where every write no matter what address will look identical to the firmware (naively, a randomized key-value map).

What does “block devices aren’t dumb anymore” mean?

Modern SSDs are log-structured under the hood. The presentation to the host system as a random access block device is an abstraction on top of that, emulating the semantics of spinning rust. Inspecting the underlying log will reveal the location of the hidden area, even if it looks random when read linearly.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#44

Post by stemlord »

theturtletalks wrote: post #33
bubblethink wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>destroy evidence Who said it was evidence? Did a judge authorize or issue a warrant to collect said evidence? Absent that, it's just your property, and you can do with it as you please.

Yes this is different than when law enforcement serve a warrant and the defendant wipes his computer before the agents can get a hold of it. In that case the warrant covers what you destroyed as evidence. Though during traffic stops, if a defendant disposes of his drugs while on the run, that can also carry a charge of destroying evidence even though no warrant was issued. IANAL

Hm but the drugs are only evidence because they're illegal? So the phone owner only destroyed evidence if the phone contained something illegal, but innocent until proben guilty?

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#45

Post by gruez »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #21
gruez wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How are they going to prove there was evidence of a crime? They don't have to, only that you destroyed evidence. That's why many people get prosecuted with "obstruction of justice" rather than the actual crime. >While destruction of potential evidence does introduce a certain amount of leeway that doesn't allow going from absolutely nothing to "evidence was on the wiped device". So if someone was doing insider tradi…

> So if someone was doing insider trading, and the SEC came knocking, then immediately afterwards they start burning every document they have and microwaving their computers, do you think they should get off the hook? Apples and oranges. They presumably already have some sort of evidence in order to get a warrant and are under criminal investigation. According to the article the agents said it was just a normal part…

>They presumably already have some sort of evidence in order to get a warrant and are under criminal investigation.

What if there was no warrant, and the SEC just came to ask questions?

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#46

Post by tamimio »

gruez wrote: post #12
Guvante wrote: post #6

How are they going to prove there was evidence of a crime? While destruction of potential evidence does introduce a certain amount of leeway that doesn't allow going from absolutely nothing to "evidence was on the wiped device". Most previous court cases involving encrypted devices have required substantial proof that the encrypted device contained incriminating evidence. To be clear "you sent this illegal thing from…

>How are they going to prove there was evidence of a crime? They don't have to, only that you destroyed evidence. That's why many people get prosecuted with "obstruction of justice" rather than the actual crime. >While destruction of potential evidence does introduce a certain amount of leeway that doesn't allow going from absolutely nothing to "evidence was on the wiped device". So if someone was doing insider tradi…

You have to prove it is an evidence of a crime to start with, speculation is not a fact. My property, my business, i can smash the phone and no one has anything to do or say unless there’s an undeniable fact that there’s an evidence there and it got destroyed, else, it’s no one’s business.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#47

Post by reenorap »

sfRattan wrote: post #25

Ultimately, when you choose to enter a duress PIN that will wipe your device, you have to recognize that choice may have legal consequences. I don't like the amount of power our government has at the national border when it comes to detaining and pressuring citizens, but our Constitution explicitly grants it at least some of the power it now exercises in that context. If your threat model includes US state actors at…

Have the duress PIN on sticker on your phone. Maybe put it backwards and don’t say anything to border patrol. Have them try it out and erase the phone and then you can legitimately say you didn’t do anything and they did it themselves.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#48

Post by yencabulator »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #19
teravor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this will likely fail as block devices aren't dumb anymore, the firmware state will out the hidden volume. counting on the laziness/unsophistication of an adversary isn't a great move. this problem may be solvable by a purpose-built abstraction where every write no matter what address will look identical to the firmware (naively, a randomized key-value map).

What does “block devices aren’t dumb anymore” mean?

SSD/NVMe keep track of what regions are wiped and which contain data that has to be preserved. To hide something in the seemingly-unused space, you have to turn off trim, eat the performance cost, and pretend you had a reason to have turned off trim.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#49

Post by vlovich123 »

greyface- wrote: post #43
JSR_FDED wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “block devices aren’t dumb anymore” mean?

Modern SSDs are log-structured under the hood. The presentation to the host system as a random access block device is an abstraction on top of that, emulating the semantics of spinning rust. Inspecting the underlying log will reveal the location of the hidden area, even if it looks random when read linearly.

I’m not so sure that log structure would reveal to you VeraCrypt style hidden volumes. It would only tell you about which blocks are allocated but the whole point is that VeraCrypt would allocate the whole space and within it have hidden space. You wouldn’t be able to infer (at least ethically, but you could lie) whether or not a hidden partition exists because you don’t know if the allocated block is present in the filesystem or was just allocated and never trimmed.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#50

Post by octoberfranklin »

dannyw wrote: post #18
Guvante wrote: post #6

How are they going to prove there was evidence of a crime? While destruction of potential evidence does introduce a certain amount of leeway that doesn't allow going from absolutely nothing to "evidence was on the wiped device". Most previous court cases involving encrypted devices have required substantial proof that the encrypted device contained incriminating evidence. To be clear "you sent this illegal thing from…

The career prosecutors at the DoJ are not the same as a couple years ago. I hope this case ends the same way as the sub sandwich assault.

If your legal system depends on the benevolence of prosecutors, you've already lost before it began.

Attorneys are supposed to be adversarial. The system's soundness shouldn't depend on anything more than them trying to win and not doing anything illegal.

Before "prosecutor" became an elected/appointed office, prosecutors were independent contractors, hired for a single case only and serving at the pleasure of the Grand Jury. The Grand Jury's job was to decide how to spend the public prosecution budget. "Indictment" meant exactly that "prosecuting this person is a good use of tax dollars" and nothing more. We should go back to that.

Post reply on HN