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Yet another case that will waste the court's time and money. All this is doing is keeping defense lawyers pocket's lined. At this point, people should buy a burner phone when going to/from the US. In that phone only have a couple of phone numbers and that's it.
At this point? This has been standard practice for a while now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you don't have those protections at the border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Even Wikipedia spells out that invasive searches require "reasonable suspicion." So we return to the core question... suspicion of what? Suspicion is not a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Amendment 4: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Amendment 5: "..nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witn…
Even lawyers with extremely different ideologies will give you convergent answers in a lot of cases, even when those answers conflict with an apparently obvious reading of the original text. Explaining that would require drilling down into details of thousands of court cases -- like reading a complex proof of a seemingly simple theorem.
I don't like that any more than you do. It's not mathematics, and even when given all the details, I usually find their inferences laughably bad -- even when I agree with the conclusion. It's not "logic" as I apply it as a logician, philosopher, or software developer. Lawyers (people on my side ideologically) will insist on the soundness of reasoning for decisions that they don't like but accept as valid.
So I don't find quoting the Constitution to be of any utility. None of those words what you think they mean. And fixing that requires basically throwing out the entire system of American jurisprudence. Which would be fine with me, to be honest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you don't have those protections at the border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Even Wikipedia spells out that invasive searches require "reasonable suspicion." So we return to the core question... suspicion of what? Suspicion is not a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Amendment 4: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Amendment 5: "..nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witn…
The original text is basically useless. They're more like a mission statement rather than directives. They set up broad aspirations, but the implementation has to be aggregated over literally millions of pages of judicial decisions. Even lawyers with extremely different ideologies will give you convergent answers in a lot of cases, even when those answers conflict with an apparently obvious reading of the original te…
And that alone is already a pretty scandalous problem. If the law is not stated in a way that ordinary people can understand, how the hell are they supposed to obey it? Those who cannot afford the highly paid law explainers are basically locked out of society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Amendment 4: He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search >Amendment 5: Destroying evidence isn't testimony. Moreover he would have been in the clear if he just kept his mouth shut.
Evidence of what? Destroying evidence assumes he is guilty of a crime which there be evidence of. Our system is predicated on an assumption of innocence. The normal threshold to accuse is a "reasonable, articulable suspicion." This does not meet that criteria.
In theory. In practice, this is a hopelessly outdated supposition.
According to the article, he was actually using GrapheneOS and gave the border official the Duress PIN. So I guess technically it was the official that erased the data :-)
I wonder whether it'd be better for a duress PIN to delete existing data and also create a semi plausible artificial profile to hide the deletion event.
Briefly: no.
Less briefly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780> and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060716> (from the grapheneos HN account directly).
Seems like it would be better to have a truecrypt type of situation, where if you put in a certain pin, then it just logs you into a separate OS with nothing you want to hide. Obviously have the duress pin if what’s in your phone is worse than the obstruction charges too.
Would it be permissible to wipe your phone before going through customs to get back into the US? If they ask to search your already wiped phone, you aren’t destroying any evidence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780>
(From the HN GrapheneOS account about a month ago.)
Paywalled, but what is the actual charge? Is it some extremely generic "obstructing an investigation" one? The US is quite good about making court documents available on line, if someone can find it.