151–160 of 206 posts
The border agents didn't act in good faith, regardless of what they're empowered to do. They wanted the data for one reason and fabricated another to prompt the device search. The data they were interested in pertained to protest activity protected under the constitution but the lie they told was about something criminal. That anything within 100 miles of the border is constitution free tosses that out, I guess, but…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Intentions matter Fed: "give us your PIN or else" me: "528491" Fed: me: "no! 528419, I meant 528419!!" Fed:
You could still be brought before a jury to determine if you knowingly provided the wrong PIN (and thus knowingly gave false testimony) or not. Records of you intentionally setting two very similar PINs and discussing any such plan could be used to convince a jury that it was malicious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Intentions matter Fed: "give us your PIN or else" me: "528491" Fed: me: "no! 528419, I meant 528419!!" Fed:
>"write the pin on a piece of paper" >"ok are you sure that's your pin?" >they exit the room and come back 5 min later >"that pin didn't work, can you write it again?" You're going to have a hard time convincing the judge that you "accidentally" gave the wrong pin in this case.
Counter-example: muscle memory.
My OH has - more than once - attempted to tell me her PIN code. On more than one occasion two of the digits have been transposed. Happily I know that it's the middle two digets that get transposed... :)
When I was designing my secure vault app for iOS[0], my approach was to make one of the “folders” (I call them vaults), to trigger the wipe out without any sign of doing so while retaining the data in the opened vault. It technically only deletes the index and the keys, and obfuscates them by replacing them with random bytes.
I already heard from a person that was forced to open their app but was let go, because they complied.
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The level of duress also matters. US citizens have been shipped to foreign prisons and there's an active case of high-level officials at DOJ violating court orders about that.
> US citizens have been shipped to foreign prisons From US soil?
The founding fathers would be aghast at what America became. Hard to imagine modern America passing some of those constitutional amendments that older America passed wayyy back.
On the other hand, why care what the American founding fathers thought? There have been two centuries since then of developments in democratic countries that some Americans could choose as a model they like more. And now it's the Chinese century anyway.
We should consider using that process! Surely things have changed enough in the last half a century to justify a new amendment or three.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Providing a fake password that wipes a device while under active questioning is a clear case of providing false testimony. False testimony of what? Can you be compelled to provide testimony that allows a police officer access to your private data? Can a police officer demand I log into my online medical chart so they can complete their investigation? > Lying to the police while under investigation is simply illegal…
> False testimony of what? False testimony of what your password is. > Can you be compelled to provide testimony that allows a police officer access to your private data? When under police investigation, you are only allowed to do one of two things: explicitly invoke your 5th amendment right not to provide testimony, or provide truthful testimony of anything the police ask you. Anything else is technically illegal. >…
Exactly. This is important, because even accidental lies can be prosecuted or used as evidence. Imagine yourself panicking under duress with someone asking you rapid fire questions that seem to contradict each other. It’s likely that you will get the facts mixed up.
This is why you need to invoke the 5th and retain an attorney in any situation where someone appears to be asking you questions about a serious crime. For all you know, they may suspect you of some heinous act that you aren’t even aware of.
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Even if the prompt was vague like "what's the pin for the phone", you'd be hard pressed to convince a judge that a duress pin (to wipe the phone) is a reasonable person[1] interpretation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
The claim was that giving the delete PIN constitutes lying or making a false statement. If someone complied with what was asked, they would not be guilty of lying, even if a reasonable person would judge that the action did not meet the intent of the ask. And it doesn't appear that they are charging him with making a false statement. The fact that the feds are using an obscure law to argue that he destroyed property…
This doesn't pass the sniff test. Consider the following:
Cops: "where were you on the night of the murder?"
Suspect: "at work"
Cops: "You're lying, we found surveillance footage of you near your girlfriend's apartment"
Suspect: "ah-ha, what I actually meant by 'at work', was that I was mentally at work!"
Of course, there's some grey area where the suspect gives cagey or vague answers, but in this case by giving a duress pin, it's pretty obvious the intention was to deceive the CBP officer.
The founding fathers would be aghast at what America became. Hard to imagine modern America passing some of those constitutional amendments that older America passed wayyy back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
in autistic-land, doesn't it seem like the power to perform searches by border police should be directed related and limited to their function - that is the inspection of material goods to insure that (a) illegal smuggling isn't taking place and (b) the proper import taxes have been paid. unless the phone itself is a suspicious good, there should never be any justification for a border officer to demand visibility of…
I think one of their main justifications for claiming a right to inspect your phone is the possibility that you could be carrying illegal data on it, such as CSAM (which they apparently invoked in this particular case). Since they generally can inspect your luggage to check if you're crossing the border with illegal goods, this seems somewhat plausible as a legal interpretation. Personally, I believe that there shoul…
There is no reason for anyone to ever try to smuggle digital data through a border crossing and so zero justification for ever conducting a digital search at the border.