You've left out the important qualifier I put at the outset of those three points:

> If your threat model includes US state actors

It was not advice for everyone, nor even most people. I have plenty of friends abroad, and a few of them have even traveled to my country for the World Cup and had a grand time.

I roll my eyes at this kind of overreaction, the same way I imagine Europeans rolling their eyes to hear Americans worried about migrant crime news stories not wanting to travel to Europe. Or maybe they used to roll their eyes at that... I'm less sure now.

But if the prosecutors can make a convincing argument that your intent was exactly that all along, then you may end up convicted anyway.

Intent matters. It might be hard to prove, but it matters.

It may not even be that hard; what other possible explanation is there for someone putting a PIN visible on their phone that wipes it while crossing a border?

Or just make it your birthday. Though I'm not at all sure the agents will try typing random codes in without at least some idea that they may work, given that many OS's will quickly start to punish with tarpitting.

Be funnier if you even write “do not enter 123456”.

I wouldn't write it down, I would just make it 1234. They're bound to try that. Then they have absolutely no case against you.

The police will ask you if the PIN unlocks the phone before using it.

Why would agents think that a number written on your phone is the PIN? That would only make sense if it was a communally-used device, not a personal one. Also, no one would put sensitive info on a devices that has the PIN affixed to it.

I suppose it's possible someone might enter it without thinking, but the odds seem low. Also seems risky to put a self-destruct PIN on your device, lest a friend (or enemy) enter it by accident or as a prank.

Edit for the confused and misinformed: 18 USC 1001. Also, is ≠ ought.

Lying to a federal officer is a crime, IIRC, and if the lie results in destruction of evidence, the person who told the lie is probably accountable for both crimes. This isn't a lie with plausible deniability: you have to set a duress PIN, understanding what it does, and then communicate that PIN instead of the unlock PIN.

A duress PIN to wipe the device don't exist to absolve the owner of liability... It exists for when compromising the device could get people the owner cares about killed or disappeared and the owner considers their own liability, disappearance, or death a preferable outcome.

It is an extreme solution for extreme scenarios. People need to be sober in weighing its use.

I’ve been arguing against some LLMs about this point for a good hour and there’s a whole lot of linking intent to action where you can be liable if a court can prove it. Not that an LLM is legal gold but it’s the best thing I have to pass ideas around with.

The entire situation is sort of nonsensical and boils down to lots of minutia in law that no normal person would know about.

For example having normal widely known security features like wiping the device after N failed PIN attempts is fine. Even having long standing security practices that can’t be related are fine, like having a timed touch point where if you don’t enter the PIN every… 15 days or whatever the device wipes, perfectly fine if it can’t be connected towards the crime and you’re not compelled to tell officers you have such a security mechanism.

Even if you were to set a trap where you use the same PIN for your bank, your laptop, and some other security devices in repetition then decide to set your duress PIN to that by assuming it would be discovered as a probable option they’d use, you’d be ok but it could be questionable if that was by design…

It’s so obscure really as to how and how you’re not allowed to protect your data, even if you’re not the one performing the action to clear destroy the potential evidence yourself. The entire thing seems pretty absurd a frankly arbitrary to me, and I don’t know how people could know which cases are and aren’t legal. I know not to destroy evidence myself but I wouldn’t know to tell someone to not use the duress pin or that even giving them my duress pin could somehow be my liability. It’s madness if you ask me.

This is my core question as well. At what point do you have to maintain property so the government can use it to testify against yourself?

If I have a dash-cam, and I wipe the SD card, can the government imply that because I erased the card, it must prove that I was speeding? The dash-cam automatically over-writes old footage - perpetually destroying evidence.

Given nebulous cases such as "hacking" a site by looking at the HTML[0], am I destroying evidence of crimes whenever I format my PC? I hope the government requires specific charges and more proof of a crime other than missing evidence. Say I destroy my diary - can the government claim that is the key evidence where I confessed to being the gunman on the grassy knoll?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28992667

Also, can they proof that there was evidence on the phone?

You’re way off about when it’s illegal to start destroying your property that the police want to seize during an investigation.

To me it’s all quite analogous to walking up to, but not crossing, a border with, say, a fruit that’s legal to possess on the side you’re on, but not on the other side, and either eating or throwing away that fruit before crossing.

“Hey! I saw you holding that Mexican pepper in Mexico, and then you threw it in that Mexican trash can before crossing into Texas!”

“Yeah, so?”

"Evidence" has never been limited to the subject of a warrant. Destruction of evidence statutes typically include material that is subject to a police investigation.

> Who said it was evidence? Did a judge authorize or issue a warrant to collect said evidence? Absent that, it's just your property, and you can do with it as you please.

Why do people go sovereign citizen when reality doesn't work their way? Stop imagining that the way you want things to be is the way things really are.

Cops do not need a judge to authorize the seizing of evidence. Cops do not need judges to decide what evidence is. Tell me, why did you just pretend like these are real requirements? I can understand why you'd want it to be that, but you wanting it to be that doesn't change reality.

It's as if you've just learned about the Fourth Amendment but know nothing about the nuance behind it.

Your system wouldn't even work at all. Let's imagine the cops get a tip that a bald man with a blue tshirt shot a man. They patrol the streets and find a match. By your logic they should not have the ability to search the man and seize his gun as evidence until a judge issues a warrant.

Yes this is different than when law enforcement serve a warrant and the defendant wipes his computer before the agents can get a hold of it. In that case the warrant covers what you destroyed as evidence.

Though during traffic stops, if a defendant disposes of his drugs while on the run, that can also carry a charge of destroying evidence even though no warrant was issued.

IANAL