This is on the dot. The entirety of their argument can be summed up as “I don’t want to give a shit about my neighbor”. And, “I don’t want to care for the hungry”. Or, “I don’t want to share medical costs with my neighbors”. Basically, “I don’t want to share anything”.

Yes if you don’t mind getting arrested by our fascist border police

Or put a dead man's switch on there

This discussion was raised last time this story was discussed. I was among its advocates: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49061890>.

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).

>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

He’ll just have to pray the scene wasn’t recorded and his real PIN was one digit off

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

The Constitution makes no exemption for a suspension of rights at the border.

It's a fairly shallow point that ignores how laws work.

The premise that the law doesn't apply because you're not in the country is false. The constitution applies generally everywhere to all Americans, it's just that what's regarded as reasonable differs during a border search. IANAL, so just my lay opinion on this. Just to validate this, it's only because the constitution exists that the border authorities have any legal basis in doing inspections.

It doesn’t matter where he was when he deleted the data. He could be in China, it’s still a crime in the us to destroy evidence wanted by American authorities.

In the truecrypt scenario you’d be using the hidden and encrypted volume only for what you explicitly want to keep hidden and use the other one for your daily life.

So in the article situation, the guy is a protestor and presumably suspects he’s going to be targeted by the police for it. He’d keep that stuff isolated from his usual activity. There’d be no need to generate convincing fake activity.

Certainly more of a hassle than having a PIN that can destroy everything.

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.

It seems like the best course of action would be to argue he did not destroy evidence, just made it unavailable at the location to force the requirement for a search warrant. It would probably be a hard sell, but I can't think of a better argument (not a lawyer).

> Moreover he would have been in the clear if he just kept his mouth shut.

Although then you get a possible delay of undefined duration, additional questioning and seizure of your device.

> He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search

Evidence with regard to which investigation?

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.

"Evidence" of what, exactly? What specific crime did they expect to find evidence of on his phone?

The words are actually extremely clear and its exceptionally prudent to quote them, because nobody with a brain can read them and fail see that the government is simply being unconstitutional - all over the place. Even when the people are powerless, we dont have to give up our powers of seeing the truth. Your post and this whole idea that "the words dont mean what they say they mean" is frankly doublespeak of the lowest form.

> None of those words what you think they mean.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

The implicit "men born outside the US are not men" is arguable worse.

What problems are you referring to?

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.

He is charged with obstruction, but under domestic terrorism (as defined by a national security presidential memorandum).

Obstruction to what though?

The gift link shows only a fraction of the article text. Just stick to https://archive.is/SflVC.

There is no duty to keep a copy of messages and private data on your phone for the FBI to peruse at its leisure. Quite the opposite, actually (according to the constitution).

It is pretty clear to me that law enforcement conspired to abuse a border crossing to effect basically an unconstitutional search ("fishing expedition"), which it would never have gotten a warrant for.

This is them being spiteful after that whole thing failed. Note how law enforcement basically admits this on the record. The whole thing is a disgrace; every decisionmaker involved in this should be sacked immediately.

Evidence of what?

How can they prove that? What if it was a glitch?

> They were going to catch him for something, some day. This incident just provided the necessary excuse to lock him up

funny reading this (don't disagree) and then also reading on HN how China is "bad" this is some gestapo shit but not surprising that it is getting normalised ...

> Oh, they may well give you bad time if your phone looks like a burner with too little content.

Issuing 'burner phones' and laptops to staff visiting countries such as China or the USA is now SOP for many companies handling sensitive data, including mine.

Don't think this isn't unusual.

This is not... advice. But if anyone's actually going to do this, the method that's worked for me...

A couple weeks before your trip, factory reset whatever burner phone you're planning on using and swap your SIM card over. Install a few basic apps you wouldn't mind them looking through. Enable hotspot/tethering, and connect your other phone via Wi-Fi.

For a couple of weeks, use the burner as much as you can with what is available on it. When you're driving, us the maps app for GPS. Make and receive some calls, ignore some spam calls. Read the news. Get a few inane text messages conversations going, etc.

When you travel, leave your regular phone at home and take the burner. When it's searched at the border, it has enough activity to pass most initial smell tests. If asked, you dropped your other phone and didn't have time to get it fixed before your trip, this is one a friend lent you.

This has worked for me. Never _actually_ into anything illegal, but just apparently had a suspicious vibe about me or something because every time I crossed the border into or out of the country I was spending 4-5 hours getting searched. Didn't need someone going through my entire life going back decades every time--once was enough.

If you are a citizen it doesn’t matter. They have to let you in.

If you are a citizen like this person is then you can tell them to fuck off, they can keep the phone, and they have to let you in.

They won't unless you are already on "their list" My phone basically looks like a burner phone, I do not use social media, do not install apps, my iphone fits (with room to spare) all "apps" on a "single page." I just call and text from my phone and have a browser and maps and that is basically it.

The last time I tried to do that on a trip to Germany, admittedly many years ago, I found I could not get phone service without a local address.

If you can, just avoid ever entering the US at all.

It has been standard practice for some time now in some European companies.