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.
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.
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
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.)
Android also requires you to enter a password on first boot. So rebooting also works there.
... and the govt would argue that the officer was doing his job. And the rubber stamping wigged political activist would merely rubber stamp that