US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

Post by yencabulator » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 1:48 AM UTC

teravor wrote: post #57

yencabulator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trimme…

Post by dyauspitr » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 1:51 AM UTC

treetalker wrote: post #40

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.

To me it’s all quite analogous to walking up to, but not crossing, a border with, say, a fruit that’s legal to possess on the side you’re on, but not on the other side, and either eating or throwing away that fruit before crossing. “Hey! I saw you holding that Mexican pepper in Mexico, and then you threw it in that Mexican trash can before crossing into Texas!” “Yeah, so?”

Post by zug_zug » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 1:52 AM UTC

bigfatkitten wrote: post #4

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…

Even in places where you can’t be compelled to hand over a password, attempting to deceive the cops will get you thrown in prison just as reliably as destroying evidence.

Post by zug_zug » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 1:53 AM UTC

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…

Post by mannanj » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

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?