Hacker News

its only with the benefit of hindsight (and being on the winning side- thus the propaganda was never dispelled) that we consider the stasi and so on the way we do.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.. might just be a duck.

I don’t believe those living “normal lives” in East Germany or the Soviet era considered the police to be evil and invasive the way we do today.

I mean its so much easier to do stuff the Stasi could only dream of with technology today.

Tens of millions have voted for this 3 times in the past 10 years, it succeeded twice. This is not going away, half the voting population of the US wants to live under authoritarian rule and will do anything to take the whole country with them.

Does anyone on the other side have a credible plan to undo the damage?

Where's the Project 2028 book?

Is there anyone credible putting together the Executive Orders to undo the stack of shit, is anyone putting together a short list of District Attorneys to interview on January 21, etc?

This is a half-truth. In a full banana republic, technical compliance with the law will not prevent consequences for failing to do what the authorities want. In a jurisdiction with perfect rule of law, it always will. The USA is somewhere in between.

One of the laws that's enforced pretty well in the USA is the protection against unreasonable search. Most of the time, a search requires showing a judge evidence that the search is more likely than not to reveal evidence of a crime. Exceptions are narrow and specific; the government's options to punish someone who refuses to decrypt data at the border are limited to brief detention and seizure of the medium.

Not yet tested is the idea that erasing data on the spot satisfies the purpose of the border search exception, which is to prevent importation of things that are illegal to import. This case might address that question.

Normally I agree, but making the implementation initially ineffective is a good way to complicate more far reaching measures.

Americans aren't standing up against this, but they might have considerably more interest if the government was instead trying to ban encrypting data in cloud storage for everyone.

There's also just the fact it's ridiculous I can't have a spare phone ready to go in a few minutes and get it back exactly as I left it.

Yes, trying to solve a regulation or legal issue by some technical workaround will never work, you have to fight it at the same level, legally, or system-wise, otherwise, you will be like the person who tries to wash the stairs from the bottom all the way up, it rarely works, you gotta go up to down, collectively go against the matter rather than individually duct taping it for your own specific needs. In that example, it won’t be far fetched the same ones who made it illegal to wipe your phone to make illegal to install xyz OS or using abc protocol, in fact, that’s exactly what they are trying to do under the disguise of “protect the kids” and going after encryption or similar privacy related issues.

Tyranny does not care about "proof".

It doesn't even care about plausible deniability.

Best you can get away with is lack of suspicion. Have a secondary phone with some standard apps on that you use now and then so theyhave a history and just look like you are just not a technical person and read novels on dead trees instead. A lot of work but likely works.

Have you considered "no password set"?

Ah I recall I used to see the creator around :) thanks for your work!

Regarding the motivation for usbkill mentioned in the article: I too was motivated to think on this stuff in relation to my sense of injustice around Ross Ulbrecht, and wanting to think of some way that someone in his position could avoid getting caught. One creative variant in my thinking involved embedding the BLE beacon inside a rubber ball that could be launched and lost track of. Or maybe embedded in heel of a shoe and ditched in transit haha

Then you probably had a home country IP and they filter based on IP.

> 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.

If you don't give a pin, they can seize your devices (Andrew Tate on his 1st visit to Florida said that he refused to give pin and they seized phone and laptop)

If you’re a U.S. citizen: CBP cannot deny you entry to the United States merely because you refuse to unlock the phone. If you’re a non-citizen seeking admission: refusal is much riskier.

The important wrinkle is that CBP’s published policy expressly guarantees that a person being admitted as a U.S. citizen won’t be denied entry solely because CBP couldn’t inspect the device. It doesn’t give lawful permanent resident (green card holders) that same explicit statement. Instead, it says refusal by a “foreign national” can be considered in an admissibility determination.

Just get a boarding pass from the counter old school style. They still print them.

That's probably a bit overkill. TSA doesn't have nearly as much power as CBP, so it's only a concern when coming back across the international border.

I mean, it sounds like it would be even better if the duress response was more subtle.

A duress code might let me wipe my phone when someone holds a gun to my head and demands I unlock it. Problem is, there’s still someone holding a gun to my head.

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

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).

Maybe it could cause the phone to "randomly" bootloop or something? "Oh no, my phone is broken again, last time this happened I needed to do a factory reset"

Or put a dead man's switch on there

> I wonder whether it'd be better for a duress PIN to delete existing data

Reliably deleting data at the scale of the whole data partition, a secondary user or a Private Space is fully supported but requires a reboot or shutdown to truly complete it.

After wiping key derivation material needed to obtain the key encryption keys in multiple ways and wiping the encrypted disk encryption keys, the OS can still access the data. It still has data in the page cache, in registers and elsewhere. There are still a bunch of system processes with data tied to what was removed. The OS is still fully functional after the nearly instant wipe of everything needed to recover the data again. It can still access all data other than what's encrypted with hardware keystore keys and not currently decrypted.

The wiping process for the duress PIN/password is completed with a shutdown which tears down everything, zeroes memory and provides at least a small time window where the hardware is powered off too. A reboot would also work and the boot process has explicit zeroing of memory, registers, etc.

We decided to use shutdown for the duress PIN/pasword but a reboot is a valid approach too. Our locked device auto-reboot timer feature we first shipped in 2021 relies on the zeroing done by GrapheneOS for both the process of the OS tearing down and then again during booting to return the device to Before First Unlock state.

> also create a semi plausible artificial profile to hide the deletion event.

It isn't feasible to fool forensic software so it largely wouldn't work against state actors. It nearly certainly wouldn't have helped in this situation in the news. They aren't reliant on a non-technical person sifting through a phone. They'll just hook it up to a laptop and follow the data extraction procedure which involves enabling ADB. The software is aware of GrapheneOS can guide people through dealing with anything different about it. They've had a lot of trouble with extraction via ADB for GrapheneOS since the vulnerabilities they exploit via ADB keep getting patched or blocked it exploit protections but it isn't realistic to block extraction with them having the PIN/password. They could just enable the encrypted backup service in the OS instead and then use CLI tools to extract the data from there with the seed phrase. They don't do that because they want everything rather than only nearly all app data. They also have special code to deal with apps such as Signal with their own layer of data encryption since the data taken from their app data directory is nearly all useless by itself.

There's also quite a difference between wiping and rebooting into a not very plausible environment with decoy data set up by the user in advance compared to not properly wiping and giving access to a decoy profile. Bear in mind the OS can still access nearly all data after the wipe until a reboot. It could make a best effort attempt at purging as much as possible from memory, but the OS is not designed to continue functioning with all of the data disappearing. It can't just wipe all loaded encryption keys without crashing and rebooting anyway. It also has a ton of data still around in caches and elsewhere. We don't want to just do a best effort job cleaning up as much as we can but rather reliably prevent recovering any of the deleted data.

We could definitely add a duress PIN/password which wipes only specific secondary profiles, reboots and has the device still functional with whatever data was in the main user still there. That's a feature we can add, but it's important to note that it will not hide that there was deletion of data. It's easy to detect, and it's not feasible to hide that it happened. Many steps can be taken to make it less obvious, but it will still be easy for software aware of it to detect. Even a massive overhaul designed to perfect it would not address the SSD itself giving away what happened for more advanced analysis.

We aren't going to add a decoy profile compromising the security of the device and providing a way to recover data in a state where it isn't at all unrecoverable yet. We did already plan to consider a 2nd duress PIN/password which only wipes specific secondary profiles, but we need to make it clear that it cannot stealthily wipe them to users.

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

>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

From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/activist-charged-wit...

> Tunick provided this code to an agent, who entered it on the phone, after which “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart.”

Since there are zero devices that are released that don’t indicate recording, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to outlaw modification of recording equipment to hide recording.

You know, the same way we would be rightfully outraged if Apple was allowing applications to turn on the web cam without signaling to the user that the camera is engaged.

That’s all aside from the fact that Hungary was run by authoritarian minded people. But just as I think it should be illegal for cameras installed in glasses to work without an indicating light, I don’t see how this recording light situation you are describing is really such a highlight of Orban’s excesses.

> Republicans might as well rename their party the Democratic Fascists of America at this point.

I'm reading Stefan Zweig right now, he was a prolific Jewish author from 1890s until his suicide in 1942, living as an exiled Jew from Austria in South America. He has written many words, over a century ago, that would support your claim.

See https://www.cbp.gov/document/directives/cbp-directive-no-334...

> The border search will include an examination of only the information that is resident upon the device and accessible through the device's operating system or through other software, tools, or applications. Officers may not intentionally use the device to access information that is solely stored remotely. To avoid retrieving or accessing information stored remotely and not otherwise present on the device, officers will either request that the traveler disable connectivity to any network ( e.g., by placing the device in airplane mode and disabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections) or where warranted by national security, law enforcement, officer safety, or other operational considerations, officers will themselves disable network connectivity. Officers should also take care to ensure, throughout the course of a border search, that they do not take actions that would make any changes to the contents of the device.

and

> Passcodes or other means of access obtained during a border inspection will only be utilized to facilitate the inspection of devices and information subject to border search. Passcodes or other means of access may not be utilized to access information that is only stored remotely. Passcodes or other means of access should only be recorded by the officer in a temporary format and should not be uploaded into CBP systems. Passcodes or other means of access recorded by the officer will be deleted or destroyed when no longer needed to facilitate the search of a given device.

I'm talking specifically about the graphene OS ability for that approach, not the ability to add an external key to some generalized encryption. The threat model here is that the traveler was required to provide a passcode unlocking a key they had with them on their phone. If that threat is not there, then this bypasses problem.

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.

The location is the crux of the "lawful" part of the search.

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.

The US views that US law applies worldwide. There is no requirement that you be anywhere near the US to be under US jurisdiction for an alleged offense against the US, according to the US.

Also, that constitutional protections are suspended within 100 miles of a land, sea, or air border.

4A still doesn't permit you to destroy the evidence. Resist on 4A grounds, destroy the evidence, 4A reasons get overturned - you've got yourself a conviction. US v. Akram Musleh.

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).

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.

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

Evidence with regard to which investigation?

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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 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.

> It's easy to see how a phone border search could be construed as reasonable

I'm curious, is there any case law from the pre digital age regarding people forced to open their briefcase and let the border guard read all their documents at a port of entry?

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

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.

The original you're riffing on is from the Declaration of Independence (a purely rhetorical document), not the Constitution of a decade later.

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

18 months is, by precedent, the limit on contempt for refusal to decrypt[0], but this administration is happy to disregard any precedent that does not agree with them.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...

Actually no, they are required to allow you to enter the country, but they will make it a hassle, to the point of dehydrating you and/or refusing bathroom access, and confiscate the device in the end and access is through other technical means.

It's complicated.

> Courts have generally found that compelling individuals to provide their numeric or alphanumeric passcode is potentially testimonial under the Fifth Amendment, as it forces the defendant to reveal “the contents of his own mind.” In Re Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum 670 F.3d at 1345; see also U.S. v. Apple MacPro Computer, 851 F.3d 238 (3d Cir. 2017). It is analogous to compelling production of the combination to a wall safe, which is testimonial, as opposed to surrendering the key to a strongbox, which is not. See Doe v. U.S., 487 U.S. 201, 220 (1988). However, even if a court finds that providing the passcode is “testimonial,” it may still fall under the “foregone conclusion” exception

https://www.nacdl.org/Content/Compelled-Decryption-Primer

In short, you can't be compelled to give up the code in a dragnet attempt to find evidence against you (e.g. a boarder guard can't riffle through your text messages to see if you might have done something illegal), but if it's already certain that particular evidence exists on the device as a result of other evidence, they may be able to compel you to give up your passcode.

Note though that the cases where this has come up are very few and far between, and there isn't a super clear overriding precedent to follow.

In general though, the best choice here is to say nothing at all and work with a lawyer to figure out how to proceed.

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/can-border-agen...

That link says you can't take a image of the disk prior to wiping.

OP is talking about just backing up what you need off-phone and then wiping it.

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).

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

Obstruction to what though?

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 ...

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.

> 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.

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.

Years ago I chatted with a border guard from another country about their job (while they were not working). Not having a phone nowadays would be considered "strange" enough to flag you. If you're not a citizen of said country, it could even dramatically increase the odds of disallowing you entry. Often this would prevent you returning for a set number of years.

At the end of the day, it's always best to just not have anything "bad" on your devices. People have been caught up for all numbers of "innocent" reasons (pictures of their kids in the bathtub, ancient photos in their albums of themselves doing illegal things such as drugs or underage drinking, text messages or browser history disparaging politicians the border guard may support, porn in your history) that can give a border guard in a bad mood good reason to ruin your day.

I personally don't want my phone data hoovered in and analyzed or marked, even though I don't really have anything to hide. I don't care enough to do anything about it, but if I did I would probably have a second travel phone with a curated amount of data, apps, accounts, etc.

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.

IIRIRA was not a 'Clinton' bill. It was initially drafted by Lamar Smith (r) of Texas (HR 2202) and subsequently attached to an appropriations bill (HR 2610), and passed with a bipartisan veto-proof majority.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/2202

https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/3610

It's easier than ever to check legal assertions before you post instead of posting incorrect information.