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Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

nytimes.com

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Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#132
post #99

So the part of this that feels like it triggers the government issue here is that in effect you have a locally stored encryption key which gates access to the device, which was removed from the device due to duress password. What if we flipped this to instead be something that's explicitly not on the device? The border search stuff only applies to information on the device. It cannot compel you to provide access to e…

Yeah, so caveat emptor: the legal system isn't something you can hack like a computer...

But...

The issue at hand is the "locality" of the encryption header. He merely facilitated its deletion, not the data.

If he had a backup at home, is that still a felony?

What about if he had a backup on a flash drive with him?

What if he never had the header on the phone to begin with and used a detached header on a flash drive?

Are detached headers (a thing you can easily do with LUKS) now de-facto illegal?

This whole thing is making me feel rather uneasy about the bigger picture.

Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#133

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.

Yes. Of course it is permissible. It is your device. The wipe must have completed before arriving at the counter.

I wouldn't assume that to be the case. It's illegal under federal law to destroy evidence of a crime. Just what the government needs to do to show that you've destroyed evidence of a crime and not just the sexting you did with your girlfriend is a pretty murky area of law, from what I can tell.

I would not present a phone to customs that had clearly just been wiped.

Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#134
post #83
post #21

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…

> 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.

The Constitution is written in plain English. And for the most part, Supreme Court decisions are written in plain English that any reasonably literate US citizen can understand. Yes, the law has technicalities and terms of art just like any other profession.

But one of the most damaging mentalities in modern times is the idea that the common man is incapable of understanding the law at even a basic level. This is flat-out not the case. Which leads to the follow-on problem: people who think lawyers have the ability to cast magic mumbo-jumbo spells that "get their clients off on a technicality" somehow. The best quote I ever heard about that from an attorney was "any time someone says a person 'got off on a technicality,' you can pretty much just safely replace that in your head with 'had their constitutional rights egregiously violated.'"

Yes, there are problems. Qualified immunity is a problem. Prosecutorial misconduct can be a problem. Abuse of discretion at the border is a problem. But that's different from doomerism about the entire justice system to the degree Very Online people express it.

Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#135
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you legally are in the US while at an American border crossing - at least if the crossing is on US land, which it was in this case. It might be more complicated for preclearance spots. It's just that normal rights are suspended there despite being in the US, even for citizens. Make of that what you will.

Your rights are not suspended, but border agents don’t need a reason to investigate you

...and then they start violating all your rights after starting the investigation lol. its just wordplay.

Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#137
post #30
post #21

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…

>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.

Problem is, he didn't destroy shit. "He" (by which I mean, technically the agents) deleted a header that's used to encrypt data but can restored from a backup.

Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#138

All Archive pages, when accessed from Italy, now are blocked by the Government: "PAGINA INTERDETTA DAL CENTRO NAZIONALE PER IL CONTRASTO DELLA PEDOPORNOGRAFIA ONLINE (C.N.C.P.O.)" “PAGE BLOCKED BY THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR COMBATING ONLINE CHILD PORNOGRAPHY (C.N.C.P.O.)” Oh, we live in an interesting age.

[dead]

Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think that would fly as a defense in court but that's not the point, the point is to not wind up in court by presenting a phone that no long contains evidence but seems plausibly like your phone so doesn't arouse suspicion

> by presenting a phone that no long contains evidence Evidence Tampering https://xkcd.com/1494/

Yeah if they can catch you and prove it.

Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such exception allowed in the Constitution. And if a case is made that they're not legally in the US yet, then by the same logic, they should not be subject to all the same laws of the US yet.

The Supreme Court has long recognized a border-search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. In United States v. Flores-Montano, the Court looked to the nation’s sovereign “interest in protecting . . . its territorial integrity” to justify such searches.3 In United States v. Montoya de Hernandez, the Court stated, somewhat more narrowly, that Congress is the source of the executive’s power. It expla…

I see a vast gulf between searching a truck of produce driven by a non-citizen vs intercepting a citizen at the boarder with known affiliations with the opposing political party.

And it's impossible to ignore that context. This is plainly wrong. And people trying to justify this plainly fascist search is sickening.

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