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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

#461

Post by Telaneo »

eecc wrote: post #456
Telaneo wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but then says he can't have me disrespecting and being a smart-ass to his cops Maybe it's just me, but I am of the exact opposite opinion. Cops have enormous power, and any misuse of it should be pushed back on hard. Cops that misuse their power should not be respected. An informed citizenry is a wonderful asset in making that power imbalance less of a problem.

Yeah, but go tell that to the judge who’s just about to slap you with a sentence. Unless you want to fight that all the way up the judicial food chain

Absolutely. It's not worth it unless you're more principled than anyone I know at least. Instead you're left with a minor punishment and most of your faith in the justice system left behind.

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

#462

Post by tonyedgecombe »

bobthepanda wrote: post #158
DanHulton wrote: post #65

If your threat model means you can’t afford for border security to view your device, wipe the damn thing yourself before crossing the border and restore it from an encrypted online backup on the other side. You’re just carrying a blank phone that you intend to set up and use later, and they can’t force you to install your backup onto a phone. Now, this is sus as hell, and you’ll probably draw all kinds of extra atten…

this isn't even that weird, when I worked in a BigTech it was pretty explicit that there were certain countries where you should not bring your actual work device through the border, and you'll get set up with a different one while in that country.

It's a shame that the US appears on that list now.

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

#463

Post by microtonal »

unwise-exe wrote: post #254

Why is the headline blaming the OS for what the user chose to do? This is like saying it's my car's fault if I decided to drive onto the sidewalk or something.

Yes, the only relevant property is the use of a duress PIN. They could have simply stated that he erased his phone with a duress PIN.

But "GrapheneOS! Spain! Profiling Pixel users! Spain equates GrapheneOS to criminals!" sounds far more spectacular and will give more clicks/links. Sadly, it feeds the narrative that GrapheneOS is just for activists/criminals/whatever. An iPhone in BFU state would have been nearly as safe, but nobody makes these implications about iPhones because everybody has iPhones.

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

#464

Post by neilalexander »

itake wrote: post #388

The duress pin deletes the encryption key information used to decode the documents and does not damage the documents themselves. Not sure why the police and news are saying that he destroyed evidence, since the evidence (as it always has existed before the search began) remains on the disk.

Someone else commented about the law being “non-autistic”, this is a perfect example of that. The technicality of the encryption keys vs the files is irrelevant, the intent was to successfully prevent a search. The border agents will not be even remotely impressed or suddenly decide to release you just because you say “well the files are technically still there”.

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

#465

Post by kombookcha »

microtonal wrote: post #455
kombookcha wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'I don't want some sketchy phone mugger to end up with sexy photos of my girlfriend/myself' would seem like a plausible reason to me, if I was a juror.

IANAL, but I think that argument would be stronger if there was a way of a mugger to use the pincode (like putting it on a note inside the case) and law enforcement just used that code.

That sounds sensible to me. But I am likewise NAL.

If you've refused to answer questions and giving them the password, and they don't have a warrant, taking your case off and inputting the mysterious number they found in there seems a lot more like them destroying your (data) property by oafishly trying to force access to a phone they have no business messing with, rather than you ostensibly destroying evidence of a theoretical undiscovered crime.

I'm sure they would still try to mess with you in a dozen ways for annoying them, but at least you'd be on decently solid ground in court as far as that goes.

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

#466

Post by [deleted] »

jjbinx007 wrote: post #428
ifwinterco wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Wiping is obviously extremely suspicious and asking for trouble" It's sad this is the default view. It's his device, his data, his life on that phone. If he had wiped the phone before the interrogation it wouldn't be a problem. How long before? A second before? A week before? But wiping the data a minute later is suddenly asking for trouble.

[deleted]

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

#467

Post by dgoldstein0 »

Telaneo wrote: post #451
matwood wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> but then says he can't have me disrespecting and being a smart-ass to his cops Maybe it's just me, but I am of the exact opposite opinion. Cops have enormous power, and any misuse of it should be pushed back on hard. Cops that misuse their power should not be respected. An informed citizenry is a wonderful asset in making that power imbalance less of a problem.

There's a difference between polite pushback and being straight up disrespectful. It shouldn't matter as the cops shouldn't abuse their power and shouldn't attack people, but we live in the real world. The judge probably didn't want to have to deal with the potential future mess if op didn't learn their lesson and got beat up by a cop.

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

#468

Post by microtonal »

Tepix wrote: post #302

Perhaps we need the following feature: Before entering the airport you set your device to auto-wipe after x hours. Once you are sitting in the airplane and flying, you cancel the scheduled automatic wipe.

A GrapheneOS is most likely completely secure in BFU state [1]. So just switch the phone off or reboot it and don't enter your PIN. It is very unlikely that law enforcement is able to decrypt the phone and it does not put you in murky legal terrain, because even an auto-wipe is intentional (IANAL).

[1] This is in contrast to many other Android phones outside Pixel and Samsung flagships, because they are too cheap to add a secure element, which iPhone has had since 2013 and Google Pixel since 2018.

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

#469

Post by yorwba »

sReinwald wrote: post #392
CJefferson wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone. Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.

Framing this as whether he can convince you the mistype was accidental gets it backwards, and "would I believe X or would I think Y" is preponderance, not reasonable doubt - entirely different standard. Reasonable doubt doesn't ask which account you find more likely. It asks whether the innocent one is unreasonable. Take the hypothetical as posed: duress code one digit off, entered while detained after being interrog…

The scenario itself is unreasonable.

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

#470

Post by atoav »

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…

My friends from the German CCC are mostly like (1) do not travel to the US and (2) if you absolutely must, travel with an empty device with decoy data and download all data you need once you're there.
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