@evacide the winning move is not to play.

I.e. don't have any devices/data with you when you cross a US border.
Even better, if at all possible, don't cross a US border. It's a Kafkaesque twilight zone where you're currently at the mercy of an openly fascist executive branch

@evacide great #grapheneos advertisement. Good.

@evacide I set my phone up to shut down and stop doing Face ID if I press it on the side. That effectively locks it out because they’re not getting my password.

@evacide

The fascist US thought police in action. Fuck this…

@evacide Just wondering if just denying that the password was a duress password and that some coincidental bug caused the device to be reset would be an effective tactic. Wouldn’t the government have to prove that the guy in fact had set a duress password? The defendant would have to perjure themselves if they testified, but in the absence of some kind of device trace that this was the reason for a device reset the prosecution evidence would solely be circumstantial.

@evacide I think you should set it up in any case... but providing it instead of the real one is an absolutely bad idea. Either don't provide or provide the correct one.

You can gamble on them trying certain common codes and if your duress pin is among these – lucky you. You can also use fingerprint+2F-PIN (e.g., 1234) as your primary method with a different PIN (e.g. 5678) as an alternative set up, and the duress PIN happen to be the same as the 2F-PIN (1234) and hope for the LEOs to "observe" you entering it – which may be blurry enough to convince a judge that you didn't trick them but they tricked themselves.

But the best way is to have no evidence in the first place, and as long as you can get away with wiping the device at a time were you can plausibly deny police being after you, you're in a good situation – but still, the judge may think otherwise.

However this is *obviously* trickery and not how duress PINs should be used, ever. *smh*

@evacide FWIW, I keep a flash drive with my house keys. It contains an ext4 file system. On it are 3 files: a directory named 'root' used as a mount point, a large file containing a LUKS file system, and a GPG-encrypted LUKS password (randomly generated and one I've never seen as plain text). At a border, I can truthfully tell them that I cannot decrypt the password without my GPG keyring, which I can't access remotely - I have to be home to get it.

@evacide I’m no law expert, but the defendant didn’t delete the information, the border security did. They did it unknowingly, but it was still them who deleted the information, and I think that matters.

He could probably still be charged with lying to police, but I’d think that’s a lesser crime.

@evacide In this scenario, a blank phone and a phone with "sus" technology both appear to be risks for an unhinged regime.

A potential approach to this is to:
1. prep a non-Graphene phone with fascist-passing use history and software installs. No sensitive data on device, even if its encrypted.
2. only access and store sensitive data remotely
3. have a verifiable alternative story for anything that is related to 2.

@evacide so many of the comments here are variations of ‘but what if X, would it still be illegal to intentionally destroy evidence then?’ (yes)

@evacide Ah the border. A place where you are subject to laws, but not protected by them. Neat trick.

@evacide A perfect example of „unlawful law“. This is a question I’m asking myself very often: What should we do when the law becomes obviously unlawful but it’s still lawfully because it’s the law?

@evacide

And then they allowed him into the US, so they could legally arrest him here.
They've got it both ways. They can snatch you while in border limbo, and certainly after they pass you through. Just setting foot on a US airport surface seems enough to justify suspicion to revoke every right.

@evacide I do wonder if this would still be considered a crime under an administration that isn't actively trying to turn America into Russia/Nazi Germany.