US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

that seems like a security nightmare...

Passing through immigration with a fully reset phone does the same. The full encrypted backup is on a HD at home. Nothing to access on the phone.

my original comment was really just about the irony and the vage formulation wrt. legality was mainly there because I wasn't sure if there might be subtle differences between "destroying evidence yourself" and "deceiving officers to destroy evidence for you", both of which are obviously not legal

The level to which people insist on nitpicking formulations with the intend to intentionally misinterpret what meaning the author tried to convey is honestly frustrating. Weather it's people which think they can doge laws, make it ethical okay to scam people or start hate complain on twitter because someones post can be misinterpreted when nit picking it's formulation reading each sentence out of context it's all unproductive, destructive and IMHO pretty mean behavior. It's also IMHO quite quixotic(1) to believe the world does or should work that way, at least IRL/outside of X. I mean in which word is it desirable that criminals can doge legal responsibility through "clever speech" or similar.

Like getting back to this case

- sure the boarder police has to much power to harass people, sure some degree of search for physical smuggling goods is needed, but as there is little point in physically smuggling digital goods (assuming you aren't North Korea) any digital searching right requiring phone unlock is more then just one step too far. Especially given how this can be abused by unlawful officers, weather it's in context of impersonation, snooping into very private matter (e.g. sexting of wife) or outright trying to breach attorney-client privilege or size companies trade secrets

- similar him being internally labeled as a "terrorist" while most likely by any sane definition only being a "activist" is nothing new, but very much not what any state of law should do

- so anything leading up to the phone unlock requirement most likely shouldn't happen

- BUT iff there where a search warrant on him for an actual reasonable matter, then yes deceiving the officers to delete his data for him by giving them a duress pin _should_ have legal consequences. Everything else would be absurd. But also a ethical & legal warrant requires that there is a well founded suspicion of there being evidence in the searched places, e.g. based on evidence of the person being entangled into criminal activity or similar.

Or in other words the problem here isn't that using a duress pin has legal consequences, but that, from the facts we have, from a democratic/state of law POV, it should never have come to a point where he is under duress to give out the PIN. Which also seems to be roughly the direction his defense goes, but that isn't fully clear from the article.

Lastly there is a (slim) possibility of him actually being a criminal by any reasonable standard playing victim, sure it doesn't look like it. But it's worth mentioning as people love an underdog story and love to hate on police/boarder control, but not every underdog is a good person sometimes police does the right thing.

But also I don't think a duress pin _usage_ should be legal, _during a lawful search_ (not unlocking your phone is a different topic, similar a duress pin which restarts your phone in lock-down mode to prevent extraction of encryption secrets from memory is another topic).

The reason is quite simple, allowing it would mean allowing actual criminals to delete evidence, which isn't desirable.

Through the "during a lawful search" part is the very important part.|And independent of weather or not the search in this case was lawful, _it shouldn't have been_. Boarder police expanded search powers should be limited to finding _physical_ smuggling/illegal goods, not phone searches (for _many_ reasons). And definitively not for a citizen without warrant, as this effectively means fundamental rights don't apply to US citizens when re-entering the US, which is ridiculous and IMHO should be found unconstitutional (sadly probably won't). (Also labeling activists as terrorist is a huge no-go for a state of law, so is making up supposedly committed crimes).

So while using a duress pin during a lawful search should IMHO always have some legal consequences, using it during a unlawful search should be fully allowed. But this still kinda sucks as finding a search unlawful requires a judge. Still if phone search in general aren't legal without warrant (IMHO they shouldn't) this would be a pretty simple case and the police should be required to drop charges without going to court if it's fully clear it is their fault...