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US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

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

#51

Post by gruez »

tamimio wrote: post #46
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…

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.

>Note this isn't the same as banning burning documents or microwaving computers, only doing so after you're aware there's an ongoing investigation.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #3
Grimblewald wrote: post #2

VeraCrypt has a cool function which is a reserved space for a decoy OS.[1] Everything else registers as free space while decrypting to dummy volume. You make the dummy volume look lived in, and forget. provide dummy password, volume decrypts such that only dummy is accessible/readable. give proper password, real OS and FS decrypt and load. Something like this may need to become the standars over duress pins which sho…

>VeraCrypt has a cool function which is a reserved space for a decoy OS.[1] Everything else registers as free space while decrypting to dummy volume. You make the dummy volume look lived in, and forget. provide dummy password, volume decrypts such that only dummy is accessible/readable. give proper password, real OS and FS decrypt and load. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057812 Implementing it in a convi…

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by crooked-v »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #50
dannyw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 G…

The comment you're replying to was focused on prosecutorial incompetence, not benevolence.

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

#55

Post by Verdex »

incompatible wrote: post #32

One of the GrapheneOS people (I think) suggested keeping a bit of paper in your wallet with the duress pin, perhaps thinly disguised. Then the cops could try it on their own initiative. I suppose they'd become aware of that trick eventually, but then they wouldn't be able to use all those other genuine pins they find.

This is an interesting idea, but was that GrapheneOS person a lawyer giving legal advice?

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

#56

Post by malcolmgreaves »

sfRattan wrote: post #31
dathinab wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the funny part is he didn't enter the pin he gave it to them and they entered it..., not sure if it makes any difference but there is a certain irony to it that it was the non warrant based search actions (which might be legal at the border) which lead to the erasure of data

Edit for the confused and misinformed: 18 USC 1001. Also, is ≠ ought. Lying to a federal officer is a crime, IIRC, and if the lie results in destruction of evidence, the person who told the lie is probably accountable for both crimes. This isn't a lie with plausible deniability: you have to set a duress PIN, understanding what it does, and then communicate that PIN instead of the unlock PIN. A duress PIN to wipe the…

I’m quite unfamiliar with this notion. What law says it’s illegal to lie when you’re not under oath during a court proceeding?

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

#57

Post by teravor »

yencabulator wrote: post #48
JSR_FDED wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't believe having trim disabled even helps here. smart firmware sees the same address being written to and may therefore reassign it to a different cell for wear leveling. it's a de facto trim.

trim lets the firmware know which mappings it can discard without the explicit reuse of the same address.

however I don't believe you can observe this effect from trim command results, it will report the usual size trimmed as if the firmware never realized that you reused the same address range multiple times.

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

#58

Post by crooked-v »

Grimblewald wrote: post #2

VeraCrypt has a cool function which is a reserved space for a decoy OS.[1] Everything else registers as free space while decrypting to dummy volume. You make the dummy volume look lived in, and forget. provide dummy password, volume decrypts such that only dummy is accessible/readable. give proper password, real OS and FS decrypt and load. Something like this may need to become the standars over duress pins which sho…

This seems like the kind of thing that would put US citizens in way more legal jeopardy than just using a secure phone with a long password, refusing to unlock it, and buying a new one if the officers involved confiscate it out of spite.

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

#59

Post by digitalPhonix »

sfRattan wrote: post #31
dathinab wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the funny part is he didn't enter the pin he gave it to them and they entered it..., not sure if it makes any difference but there is a certain irony to it that it was the non warrant based search actions (which might be legal at the border) which lead to the erasure of data

Edit for the confused and misinformed: 18 USC 1001. Also, is ≠ ought. Lying to a federal officer is a crime, IIRC, and if the lie results in destruction of evidence, the person who told the lie is probably accountable for both crimes. This isn't a lie with plausible deniability: you have to set a duress PIN, understanding what it does, and then communicate that PIN instead of the unlock PIN. A duress PIN to wipe the…

> Lying to a federal officer is a crime

That doesn’t pass the sniff test

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

#60

Post by sfRattan »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #56
sfRattan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit for the confused and misinformed: 18 USC 1001. Also, is ≠ ought. Lying to a federal officer is a crime, IIRC, and if the lie results in destruction of evidence, the person who told the lie is probably accountable for both crimes. This isn't a lie with plausible deniability: you have to set a duress PIN, understanding what it does, and then communicate that PIN instead of the unlock PIN. A duress PIN to wipe the…

I’m quite unfamiliar with this notion. What law says it’s illegal to lie when you’re not under oath during a court proceeding?

18 U.S. Code § 1001 [1]

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

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