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‘The Government Hopes To Set a Precedent’: An Interview With the Man Charged for Allegedly Wiping His GrapheneOS Phone (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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The U.S. government has charged Samuel Tunick with allegedly typing in a passcode to wipe his phone before officers could search it. “I hope people understand that the charges against me are meant to intimidate people,” he said.

Just another example of the Trump admin trying to intimidate protestors using whatever the fuck they can to bring up whatever charges they can.

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[–] 29 points 2 months ago (11 children)

That's actually what the duress password does and did here. Deleting the data would be too slow, so it gets rid of the keys instead.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    I wonder; can those keys be backed up to a seprate device, and reinstated later?

    So: could you use the duress passcode to wipe the keys, making the device unreadable; then later use a backup to restore those keys and regain access?

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    My recollection is that the keys are stored on the TPM and can't be exported. Backups kick the can down the road; now the adversary demands access to your backups. If the keys can't leave the TPM and the TPM is wiped, then there is no more leverage that can be applied that will unlock the phone. The adversary might still try to get at other kinds of backups anyway to search for whatever data they were after to begin with, but that's a separate issue.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    I'm sure there's a difference between "I deleted evidence" and "I deleted evidence off this device you're inspecting without a warrant, you can have it with a warrant".

    But I also feel that unless there's suspicion of a specific crime, you can't really accuse someone of deleting evidence. And no, protesting peacefully is not a crime.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    In the US, they can't force you to give a password. Because they can't prove you haven't forgotten it.

    In this case, it was an officer who was attempting to gain unauthorized access to a device and then accidentally entered a code that caused it to wipe its own data

    So the activist has a pretty good case here to sue the officer for damages

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Because they can’t prove you haven’t forgotten it.

    Technically, no.

    They can't force you to give a password because of court precedent around the 5th amendment. Courts ruled that being forced to give a password counted as being forced to divulge information and was thus a violation of your 5th amendment right to remain silent and not incriminate yourself.

    That's why they're still allowed to force you to give biometrics to unlock a device, though. Different court cases have ruled that being forced to put your finger on a fingerprint reader or show your face to a face scanner does not count as being forced to divulge information -- since it's action, not information -- so law enforcement is still allowed to force you to do those things.

    (Which means, if you're about to be arrested or you're crossing a border or something and you don't want your device searched, you should disable any biometric unlocking features first. I'm not familiar with Android, but in iphones, you can do this by restarting/powering off the phone (always requires pin/password on first boot) or by pressing the lock button repeatedly while already locked.)

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    the keys are stored on the TPM and can't be exported

    Makes sense; if you can export them, so can an adversary.

    now the adversary demands access to your backups

    Only if they know/think they exist. The idea here would have been to make a nondescript offline backup of the keys and keep them totally seprate from the rest of your data/belongings. Possibly in a geocache type location.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    The services (cellebrite) they use to crack normal androids and iphone s would surely let them know that there was an off site backup that likely exists, given that the company doing it knows grapheneOS exists and is used by journalists and their owner's regime is the top murder of journalists in the world

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    ... and that would require a search warrant. But then the highwaymen would have to go in front of a wigged political activist to seek approval of a search warrant. Baseless allegations by someone with dubious jurisdiction?

    Bet that hearing would never make it into the press

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