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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

#371

Post by GiorgioG »

Anyone that is surprised by this or somehow thinks this is new clearly hasn't crossed the border a whole lot. I grew up in a city along the US/Canada border. You don't fuck around with US Customs (or Canadian) agents. My cousin (not always so friendly) pissed off a US Customs agent (in the 90s mind you) and they promptly took his car and disassembled much of it looking for non-existent drugs. When they put it back together it was never the same. Their job is to be suspicious, 99.999% of the time people are completely innocent. But let 1 bad person through and it's Customs' fault for whatever bad thing they do. Not an easy job. Not an excuse for how they can misbehave either.

Is it right? It makes no difference, Customs can make your life miserable, that's just the reality of it, always has been and it can't have gotten better in recent times.

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

#372

Post by jrmg »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #359
jrmg wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA started from and has come back from way worse in the past. Some dark, dark things happened in the USA, and almost every progression had a corresponding backslide - but the tick-tock has always ticked further towards a freer, more equal, and more equitable society. Progress doesn’t always (ever?) require complete collapse. I’m willing to hope this era is another ‘tock’. But that does require people to not just…

>but the tick-tock has always ticked further towards a freer, more equal, and more equitable society. This is a popular sentiment, not a statement of historical fact. Arguments both for and against this are credible.

You can make a credible argument that the American society is less free, less equal, and less equitable than it was at its founding?

There are just so many ways in which this seems crazy to me. I feel like you think you’re luring me into some sort of rhetorical trap - but to pick the two elephants in the room, a large proportion of the population was literally owned by other people, and only white male landowners could vote.

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

#373

Post by armadyl »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #315
overfeed wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you should be safe, apart from some kind of rubber-hose cryptanalysis. There are vendors that sell the technology to adversarially access phone data, the "Before First Unlock" is the safest state a phone can be, but it's not infallible. The safest option is to have a burner or factory-reset phone with nothing on it, even if the hack succeeds.

I've worked with Cellebrite, the industry standard in IT forensics for unlocking and imaging phones. It just runs a series of known exploits. PIN lock, data encryption and regular updates will beat it most of the time.

> I've worked with Cellebrite

Any chance you want to do a public service and publish the latest compatibility matrix?

Just joking, obviously…

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

#374

Post by hamper653 »

someguydave wrote: post #107
hamper653 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search Evidence with regard to which investigation?

Border agents are entitled to investigate anything for any reason more or less

But did they? Was there an actual investigation going on?

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

#375

Post by grapheneos »

dredmorbius wrote: post #89
quickthrowman wrote: post #45

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.

There are apparently problems with wipe/restore under GrapheneOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780 > (From the HN GrapheneOS account about a month ago.)

It has an encrypted backup/restore system.

We were talking about an attacker taking an image of the SSD prior to it being wiped not helping them because information needed to derive the key encryption keys is gone from the secure element. It similarly doesn't help them to do a brute force on a server farm since they're rate limited by the secure element. It only allows 20 attempts and has rapidly increasing delays between those. There's also hardware bound key derivation but that only helps improve the strength of a decent password. The secure element rate limiting makes even a random 6 digit PIN highly insecure unless an attacker can exploit the secure element.

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

#377

Post by fooqux »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #369
joenot443 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era -- except of course with 1000x more invasive and effective surveillance tech. I'm pretty optimistic that after the next general America will be ready to give up on the extremity of late turn over a new leaf. I fully expect a new president to be ushered in, whether R or D, and for some level of normalcy to start creeping back. The Sovie…

America dominance on the world is ending, it's a fact. East Asia is at least on par, India is china from 25 years ago. It's becoming more obvious every day. And yeah, people in 1910 watched Europe dominate the world for about 1500 years. Yet it came to an end. If you want to Speedrun the collapse, vote for trump. He sure is making a good job right now with diplomacy, lack of long term planning and just getting all yo…

I'm just not sure what to do. What the US is turning into is incredibly sad and I wish I could leave.

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

#378

Post by cucumber3732842 »

robviren wrote: post #47
34679 wrote: 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…

But the bar for hauling someone to court and defacto punishing them financially and smearing them in the eyes of the public is so low. And the path to getting compensation for wrongful prosecution so fraught. What an easy tool the justice system is to punish uppity citizens thinking they don't have a king.

You think they'll see a courtroom? Ha! If they're lucky they'll get there in 5yr and $15k.

When the administrative enforcement bureaucracies want to harass you they'll hit you with some ruinously expensive civil fine BS. No court will give a crap about you until you've exhausted a bunch of appeals, which you of course appeal to the same agency that's trying to screw you. Only after years of that (and invariably legal fees, because you can't go it alone), do you sue them and get to see a real courtroom. But even then, this is a civil matter, not a criminal one, so all your rights have been nerf'd and there's a hundred years of precedent and case law that tilt things in their favor. If you get lucky, they'll settle and you'll only be out a few tens of thousands for the ordeal.

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

#379

Post by mcmcmc »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #369
joenot443 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era -- except of course with 1000x more invasive and effective surveillance tech. I'm pretty optimistic that after the next general America will be ready to give up on the extremity of late turn over a new leaf. I fully expect a new president to be ushered in, whether R or D, and for some level of normalcy to start creeping back. The Sovie…

America dominance on the world is ending, it's a fact. East Asia is at least on par, India is china from 25 years ago. It's becoming more obvious every day. And yeah, people in 1910 watched Europe dominate the world for about 1500 years. Yet it came to an end. If you want to Speedrun the collapse, vote for trump. He sure is making a good job right now with diplomacy, lack of long term planning and just getting all yo…

Moving on from being a unipolar power does not necessitate societal collapse. The UK is still around and their empire fell a long time ago.

> If you want to Speedrun the collapse, vote for trump.

This nonsense needs to stop. You can’t vote for him again unless he deigns to run for a lower office (unlikely). Term limits are real. America needs to start planning for the post-Trump era and hopefully mitigate further damage with a blue wave in the midterms. Or with non-MAGA republicans who might even return to actual fiscal conservatism.

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

#380

Post by hamdingers »

NewJazz wrote: post #291
hamdingers wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or keep it in a faraday bag and have the phone wipe if it sees it. If you're ever searched (or otherwise indisposed), they'll open the bag and wipe your phone for you.

This depends on the beacon being visible. If they just take the phone and walk away, because that's where they think the evidence is, it won't wipe.

When I've gotten secondary screening the first thing they do is take all my belongings and rifle through them on a table. That seems to be standard practice and I'm sure it was step 1 in Tunick's ordeal.

Both approaches have situations they wouldn't work in. If you're extra paranoid you could do both.

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