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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

#441

Post by coldtea »

Aurornis wrote: post #180
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"U.S. law though is highly non-autistic" hilarious but also another point to emphasize is how truly depressing American courts often are. Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psycholo…

> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. This is a misunderstood statistic. Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success. They don't operate like two private parties suing each other to force the court to decide something. If the evidence is there or the charges aren't fully formed, they don't waste resources on it. This leads to a contradictory set of complai…

>Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.

Given the incarceration rates compared to average western standards, that's a moot point. Even if they selectively pursue, they do pursue a hell of a lot, and they do get a hell of a lot of convictions - relatively. Factor in the severity of the convictions, also much worse compared to average western standards even for the same offenses, and it's an ever worse picture.

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

#442

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Aurornis wrote: post #180
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"U.S. law though is highly non-autistic" hilarious but also another point to emphasize is how truly depressing American courts often are. Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psycholo…

> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. This is a misunderstood statistic. Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success. They don't operate like two private parties suing each other to force the court to decide something. If the evidence is there or the charges aren't fully formed, they don't waste resources on it. This leads to a contradictory set of complai…

> Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.

The problem with this theory is that it ignores the incentives on the other side in a criminal case. When you get charged with something, the prosecutor offers you a deal and that deal is almost invariably a significantly lower penalty than what happens if you go to court and get convicted. The plea deal is a lesser charge, if you demand a trial then they throw the book at you, stack charges and ask for more severe penalties for each one.

With the result that if someone actually did it, demanding a trial instead of pleading guilty for a lesser sentence has a large negative expected value. Which in turn implies that it doesn't make sense to do unless you think there is a high probability you can win, for example because you know you didn't do it. The coercive force is so large that it can cause innocent people to plead guilty, since even a 10% chance of losing can screw up your whole life when it means a 10x higher penalty.

And yet > 90% of the people who thought their chances of being acquitted were high enough to be worth taking a much large sentence on conviction, still get convicted. Which seems suspicious.

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

#444

Post by victorbjorklund »

reenorap wrote: post #294
nkrisc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the prosecutors can make a convincing argument that your intent was exactly that all along, then you may end up convicted anyway. Intent matters. It might be hard to prove, but it matters. It may not even be that hard; what other possible explanation is there for someone putting a PIN visible on their phone that wipes it while crossing a border?

There’s no way to prove intent if you keep your mouth shut and don’t answer anything.

Yea, that’s not how it works in practice. If they catch you standing over a dead body holding the murder weapon. Then you can’t just say they can’t prove intent if you keep your mouth shut.

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

#446

Post by victorbjorklund »

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…

It is evidence. Something can be evidence even if the evidence does not prove any crime.

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

#447

Post by happymellon »

a34729t wrote: post #176
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"U.S. law though is highly non-autistic" hilarious but also another point to emphasize is how truly depressing American courts often are. Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psycholo…

Exactly. People complain police dont prevent crime, but dont realize that is not their purpose. The police exist to protect the government, not the people.

Police don't prevent crime, they arrest and charge people for committing crime.

Arresting people because they might/could commit a crime would be a bad route to go down.

> The police exist to protect the government, not the people.

The police exist to protect the rule of the land. The military exists to protect the government.

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

#448

Post by einpoklum »

matwood wrote: post #437
schoen wrote: post #383

I co-wrote a border search guide for EFF some years ago. I was very interested in finding clever technical approaches but I later ended up feeling that I hadn't given enough thought to the overall threat model questions (even though the guide did address them, perhaps even somewhat usefully). The big picture problem is that the agents performing the searches have an enormous amount of power in terms of potentially se…

> I think they should not have this power, but the agents and courts probably don't care that I think that. ... > and about not angering the agents more than you plan to When I was a teenager (long ago at this point), I got into an argument with a police officer over surfing in a certain area. It was pouring down rain, so he was annoyed he had to sit outside and wait for my friends and me to come to shore. Once we go…

Too bad you could not bring that judge up on charges of judicial misconduct - if he indeed told you that the charge against you had no merit, but decided to punish you anyway because he did not approve of your demeanor.

... or otherwise, that people in your community could not apply any counter-pressure to such judicial behavior, in the media and public fora.

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

#449

Post by schoen »

ifwinterco wrote: post #413
IshKebab wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I guess what you really want is a duress PIN that loads into a fake innocent profile.

Yes I thought this was the standard solution? People have been doing this since way back in the TrueCrypt days - IIRC you could configure it to run a whole fake version of Windows if you wanted without easily revealing your actual main volume. Most hardware crypto wallets also have a "duress wallet" feature where you keep a low balance for the same reason. Wiping is obviously extremely suspicious and asking for troub…

We noted in the border search guide that lying to the agents in response to their questions is potentially a crime in its own right (even if it's not done in order to hide anything illegal). We thought that this made hidden volumes quite tricky, particularly if one's intent was to pretend to comply with a question or request while actually not complying.

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

#450

Post by bubblethink »

halestock wrote: post #79
cameldrv wrote: post #74

I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet over the years say things like “the government can’t make x illegal, it’s just y.” For example, the government can’t make wiping your phone at the border illegal, it’s just punching four numbers into your phone, just like a pin, only a different four numbers, which could just have well been your pin. U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is jus…

A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.

It's not that there's a human interpreting the law. It's that there is a politically motivated human interpreting the law, or in other words, you are sol if the state wants to get you. The engineer's arguments aren't reductionist, they are idealistic.
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