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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

#861

Post by wat10000 »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #467
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.

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.

There’s no legal difference between polite pushback and disrespect. In a just world, the commenter should have had zero consequences, and the cop should have gone to prison for assault and abuse of authority.

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

#862

Post by andrewflnr »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #765
mattlondon wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in these situations your absolute best bet is fawning compliance. Ask precisely how high they want you to jump. Perhaps your friendly smiling Yes-Sir-No-Sir-3-bags-Full-Sir act might just be enough to let you get on your way without anything else happening apart from a stamp in your passport. Even the slightest hint of defiance or surliness from you to a border guard/policeman/etc - potentially at the end of…

> I genuinely don't think there is a "get out of jail free card" ... Being rich and politically connected would probably do it.

That's not free. It simply means you can afford to buy the very expensive get-out-of-jail cards.

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

#863

Post by orthecreedence »

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.

"You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime, and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of property."

- Michael Parenti

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

#864

Post by 15155 »

Mezzie wrote: post #650
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'm sharing this experience just to share, not suggesting or making any claims about what people should do with it: One of the best ways to get through airport CBP quickly without being overly hassled is to be overtly, clearly sick in a gross way. If you're about to vomit or have horrible diarrhea, they do not want you in that line any longer than you have to be. If they're the type to want to take people down a peg,…

Sounds like you swallowed balloons containing drugs and one of them burst.

You might need some additional screening or to have a seat on the Drugloo to make sure everything comes out OK.

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

#865

Post by Itoldmyselfso »

deltoidmaximus wrote: post #664
lentil_soup wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you may have to think both about protecting your data by technical means, and about not angering the agents more than you plan to That's the same problem with technical solutions to crime. I come from a very dangerous city and I used to have a car that needed a PIN to work. You could turn then engine on and drive but after a minute if you didn't input the PIN it would turn off without warning and start blasting the…

And there's the problem that if the PIN or worse a biometric version of this becomes remotely well known you've now created an incentive for a car thief to kidnap people even if they only want the car.

Many cars already have internal/cabin view camera. I'd imagine it will sooner or later get detection for potential theft and kidnapping situations, where it can simply detect the driver by face and prevent driving if it doesn't recognize the invidual as one granted driving privileges.

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

#866

Post by basilikum »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #802
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…

I worry about approaches like this because maybe the forensics tool fills all available space and then clears it, noticing that this particular phone is an anomaly re: manufacturer published space = allegedly available space + size of known files If you're hiding something in "empty space" it won't behave like empty space when you try to fill it. I think we need to be stenographically smarter. Like if there's some me…

That's not how VeraCrypt hidden volumes work.

> If you're hiding something in "empty space" it won't behave like empty space when you try to fill it.

Yes, it will. It will overwrite the hidden data.

When you have a 1 TB drive that you encrypt with VeraCrypt using a hidden volume the following happens:

You have an outer decoy volume. This volume is 1TB in size and works like any other VeraCrypt volume.

You have a smaller, hidden inner volume with a different password. When you unlock this volume the following happens: Veracrypt tries to unlock the normal voume, but fails because the password is incorrect. It now tries to decrypt a secondary volume header at an offset. This header contains the layout for the hidden volume which is positioned inside the free space of the outer volume. So the position of the hidden volume is encrypted.

Now when you want to plant decoy files in the outer volume you actually do the following: While unlocking the volume you enable the option for hidden volumes and now you enter both passwords. So VeraCrypt knows where the inner volume is located and how large it is so it will not overwrite it. VeraCrypt will show the adjusted smaller size for the outer volume.

When you're in a situation where you are forced to give up your password: You tell them your decoy password. They open the outer decoy volume. It appears like any other VeraCrypt volume spanning the whole size of the disk. If they write any files to it that might overwrite parts of the hidden volume.

Notably all standard VeraCrypt volumes principally feature the option of hidden volumes. You cannot proof that a VeraCrypt volume does not have a hidden volume (short of it being full in the first place). The user base of people not using hidden volumes gives the plausible deniability to the people who do. Which is worth knowing as this can get you in trouble in certain scenarios.

There are some issues with this though:

SSD wear leveling and especially TRIM. You must not TRIM the blocks of the hidden volume, which can reveal it as it shall appear as free space that would usually be trimmed. So disable TRIM, which is suspicious in itself. Though TRIM also leaks information about file layout even for normal volumes, so there is some plausibility left. But it's not ideal. This is not an issue with HDDs (maybe with SMR though).

I don't remember exactly, but I think you can do statistical analysis on the layout of files inside the outer volume and deduct the existence of the hidden volume from this under certain circumstances. Essentially, in a normal volume the filesystem would have written this file to these blocks, but it didn't and chose other blocks instead. So there must have been a block layer translation that reroutes blocks from the hidden volume and these free blocks that should not be free must be the hidden volume. I'm not too sure that's really what it was about.

5$ wrench method. I suspect you are hiding certain information in this VeraCrypt volume. I torture you. You give me the password. The information is not in there. Either you do not have the information or you are lying and using a hidden volume. I continue to torture you for the second password on the chance that you're using a hidden volume. This is what I was about earlier when I said VeraCrypt can get you in trouble.

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

#867

Post by pageandrew »

drop_star wrote: post #851
aucisson_masque wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Don't travel with anything you can't afford to lose on device. This means setting up travel-specific password managers and hardware keys for a subset of your accounts that you absolutely need to access while abroad, and being prepared to reset those passwords and disable those hardware keys very quickly once home. > 2. Review past legal cases against travelers and identify what behaviors the government considers…

> Just don't go to the usa As a Canadian. I won't be going there for a long time

Canadian border control has the legal authority to search your phone and you are obligated to provide a password.

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

#868

Post by rawgabbit »

alwa wrote: post #858
tmp10423288442 wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not a lawyer but if you are a citizen they probably can't deny you entry but can probably detain you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and seize whatever they want. Your best defense is to have a burner phone and no other devices nothing they can seize that would hurt you. Even having a burner phone without any personal information on it can be deemed suspicious. It would be best for your phone to have a re…

Suspicious, maybe; but not criminal (like lying to a federal officer in the course of an investigation, or willfully destroying what they’re lawfully trying to search). Probably even more suspicious if you make sketchy excuses when the truth is fine. I’d go with “I (or %COMPANY%) figure electronic devices get imaged at borders or potentially stolen abroad, so we don’t carry them when we travel.” Blame the other count…

Unfortunately I agree with James Mickens. If CBP asks me to turn on and unlock my phone, I do it.

It is the same advice that cops give to young black men in “the talk”. Comply, don’t get killed, hire a lawyer and fight injustice in court.

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

#869

Post by mos_basik »

alwa wrote: post #858
tmp10423288442 wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not a lawyer but if you are a citizen they probably can't deny you entry but can probably detain you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and seize whatever they want. Your best defense is to have a burner phone and no other devices nothing they can seize that would hurt you. Even having a burner phone without any personal information on it can be deemed suspicious. It would be best for your phone to have a re…

Suspicious, maybe; but not criminal (like lying to a federal officer in the course of an investigation, or willfully destroying what they’re lawfully trying to search). Probably even more suspicious if you make sketchy excuses when the truth is fine. I’d go with “I (or %COMPANY%) figure electronic devices get imaged at borders or potentially stolen abroad, so we don’t carry them when we travel.” Blame the other count…

>YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'ED UPON

Thanks for that, it's been a few years and I'd forgotten about this.

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

#870

Post by AnthonyMouse »

arcbyte wrote: post #697
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 char…

What youre saying is true, but the reality is that the number of people actually affected by it is vanishingly small. Of course its not vanishing if youre that person affected, but as far as the system goes, its negligible. The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely los…

> The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely lose your criminal case.

Let's unpack this.

The first assertion is that most people who get prosecuted are guilty. This is assuming the conclusion -- the whole question is whether the system is getting it wrong. The presence of convictions can't be used to prove the absence of false convictions. The presence of more convictions increases the probability of more false convictions. And if we had a reliable way to know the real truth then none of this would be a problem to begin with.

The second is the implication that they're all guilty because there are so many overbroad laws that actually everybody is guilty. But that's just a description of a mechanism by which the system convicts "innocent people", i.e. ordinary people who never had any intention of committing a crime. Making so many things illegal that following every law is beyond human ability and anyone can be convicted at the government's discretion is the thing people are objecting to.

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