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.
It is singularly evil that they trot out the “CSAM” excuse with zero evidence.
That’s meant to smear this guy in the press. People will see an arrest in the news, some mention about CSAM. The details will not sink in for most people b/c this is like the 20th thing they read that day, and in an information overload environment, there is too much to retain. His name gets tarred with something aborrent, without cause.
It can even come up in the future. Job searches his name, scary words come up, terrorism, CSAM. Well, better safe than sorry, maybe we shouldn’t hire that guy!
It’s cartoonish levels of evil. But courts are starting to cotton on, and are talking about the gov no longer enjoying the presumption of regularity. In the past, it was assumed cases were brought in good faith.
100%
This seems to be a clear case of “unreasonable search and seizure”, aka a Constitutional rights violation, however the USA is increasingly lawless so who knows whether he gets off.
So SOP for travel anywhere near a border now should be full imaging of phone and encrypted backup on a server you control, wipe of phone before getting within CBP jurisdiction, then re-image once out of their jurisdiction. Hell, have an image to flash with nothing but early-internet shock memes (goatse, tubgirl, kids in a sandbox, etc) for the time while in CBP jurisdiction.
I mean it couldn’t hurt but as far as I know there is no active full chain vulnerability for GOS so you could just not and they have no way to access it.
I have no doubt that the government has access to zero days and/or just straight up image your phone so they can crack it at a later point in time if/when it is convenient to them. I used to think that was giving them too much credit and is in tinfoil hat territory but with the convergence of private interests and government, I truly think this is the reality of what can/does happen
I have big doubts. We’ve seen them struggle with less.
Here is the full article click on the arrow to display it
text of article
In charging a man for allegedly typing in a duress password which wiped his privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone, the U.S. government is trying to intimidate other activists from protecting their data and participating in social movements, Samuel Tunick, the man charged, told 404 Media in an interview on Tuesday.
The case of Tunick, who participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, has resonated across privacy and civil liberties circles. 404 Media first broke news of the case in December. Last week, The Guardian reported additional details including from a court hearing in the case. The maximum sentence for the alleged crime is five years in federal prison.
“I hope people understand that the charges against me are meant to intimidate people against protecting their data and their privacy, and the government hopes to set a precedent that no one has the right to privacy,” Tunick told 404 Media in a conference call with his federal public defender Matthew Dodge.
Asked about his reaction to the wide attention his case has gotten, Tunick said it’s “a little surprising, but encouraging that people seem to care about this issue.”
In January 2025, Tunick was returning to the U.S. from a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Dodge explained that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers called the airport ahead, said Tunick was coming through, and asked officers to stop him. “‘We want you to get his phone and search his phone,’” the officers said in Dodge’s retelling.
The officers asked Tunick if they could search his bags, and he said no. The agents searched them anyway and found nothing unlawful, Dodge said. Tunick declined to be patted down, but again the agents searched him anyway, and they found nothing improper, Dodge said. Then the agents said they wanted to search his phone. Tunick declined and asked for his lawyer multiple times. Finally, the agents asked for his phone, and gave a pretence of searching for child abuse imagery, according to Dodge.
Tunick gave a code which an officer typed into the device, Dodge said. Rather than unlocking the phone, the device “went to a blank screen” and displayed the GrapheneOS logo, Dodge explained. GrapheneOS, a mobile operating system that has a wealth of privacy and security upgrades, has a duress password feature that “will irreversibly wipe the device,” according to GrapheneOS’s website. Asked for comment, Daniel Micay, the founder of GrapheneOS, pointed 404 Media to a recently published overview on the operating system’s defenses against data extraction.
With the phone inaccessible, Tunick was free to go and left the airport. Around a year later he was indicted for allegedly destroying “the digital contents of a Google Pixel” phone. Dodge said he only found one other case using the same law, a drug trafficking investigation. “This is extraordinarily rare,” Dodge said.
“The agents tried to rig this game by making this all come to a head at the airport,” he added. Ordinarily authorities would need a warrant to search the contents of someone’s phone; at an airport, those protections often do not apply. “They could have asked the judge for a search warrant for Sam’s phone if they thought they had evidence of a crime. They didn’t do that,” Dodge added.
A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “All travelers are subject to inspection to ensure compliance with U.S. laws. These inspections, including questioning and the rare search of electronic devices, are conducted on a case-by-case basis, taking into account factors such as travel history and law enforcement alerts.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
In the interview with 404 Media, Tunick put his prosecution squarely in the context of the sprawling cases against other Stop Cop City protesters and other activists in the U.S. more broadly. He pointed to the RICO charges against dozens of people, with 61 of those charges later being dropped (some still faced domestic terrorism charges). Tunick said that case had him listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.
Tunick also pointed to the landmark domestic terrorism Prairieland case in which people protested an ICE facility (one of those people received a 100 year sentence for shooting a police officer), and the newly signed National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) which the ACLU says seeks to target nonprofits and activists.
“Many of us had a suspicion that this was kind of the testing ground for a new, more heavy-handed trend in policing in America. And that does seem to be in fact the case: that Atlanta was sort of the testing ground for a more authoritarian, heavy-handed approach to social movements,” Tunick said. As 404 Media reported in March, Proton Mail provided user data that helped the FBI unmask an anonymous Stop Cop City protester.
Tunick described to 404 Media how before the airport encounter, he tried to get a job at a Christmas tree lot. The job involved going onto the property of a school, so it required a background check. Despite not having a criminal record, he failed the background check, Tunick said. He went to the Atlanta Public Schools office to find out why, and was eventually given a phone number and told to contact the FBI, Tunick recalled. He also said a hidden camera was placed outside a house he used to live in.
Later, he found out from his lawyer that a tracker had been placed on his car. He also learned his cellphone records were subpoenaed, and he said he got an email from Google saying his Gmail account had also been subpoenaed.
“They really just tried to dig up anything they could on me and they didn’t find anything,” Tunick said. “At this point, it almost seems like it’s just intended to make my life miserable and discourage participation in any sort of advocacy or activism.”
Initially, Tunick was shocked by the phone wiping charge, he said. Once that feeling faded, he said the charges made sense in the arc of government “repression that we’ve seen over the last year and a half.”
Regarding his case about being charged for allegedly wiping a phone, Tunick said, “I just hope that other citizens and activists understand that this is not a precedent that we should allow to be set.”
Update: this piece has been updated to include a statement from CBP and that the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
screenshot of article
Link to the screenshot. https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/30b71352-4e4d-4d9a-bdd9-0913abc89bc2.png
Much appreciated. Man am I sick of providing personal information for every fucking website. Granted, I’ve been using fake info now for a very long time, but it’s still a pain in the arse creating accounts constantly
Same. With 404 media its luckily only an email no name or date of birth. But it still suck you have to.
Thank you!!
They say it’s to stop scraper bots, but they would have better success replacing a check that can be bypassed by disabling javascript with actual bot detection. Cap looks like a good option and Turnstile is included in Cloudflare.
something something consent of the governed
typing in a passcode to wipe his phone before officers could search it.
I wonder if that’s actually what he did. You’re supposed to hand them the phone and let them type in the duress code. Then it’s not you who wiped it.
Another commenter in another thread said essentially just put the duress pin in your wallet with nothing else about what it is. Then say nothing about what that pin is. Then let them try it. Probably will get the same result because you didn’t “warn” them or something, but it would be a harder case as you didn’t tell them to put it in.
It might change a situation like this, but for a real criminal case, that does nothing. They will make an initial forensic image of the device. For this reason and others.
In this situation, there was no criminal case, no probable cause, and no warrant. They do have the border 4A exception. NAL, but I think they pushed that exception WAY tf past its breaking point here.
This kind of detail only matters if due process is still being observed.
There’s a scene that comes to mind from “The Yellow Tie” (2025) where a street patrol in Nazi Germany makes the protagonist strip naked just to have a laugh, then as they leave they wonder if they should’ve shot him anyway, despite not doing anything wrong.
hey, remember when that was a concern of countries under dictatorship?
Well, it still is. The US is becoming one.
Is one.
I thought the USA did away with that whole issue of precedent when they took out row v wade?
You don’t get it. It was never about past decisions guiding or restricting future ones.
What precedent is: a) to be used as an argument and b) a way for the high court to set rules for lower ones to abide by… Until the next recalibration.
Precedent isn’t a permanently binding law. The entire point of the judicial branch is that they get to interpret the law and decide when it applies. Precedent is binding on an individual basis, in that a particular judge or subset of judges are supposed to follow the precedent set by their court, but they have the ability to reinterpret that precedent, it usually just has to be done by the full circuit of judges or a higher court.
What happened to Roe v Wade sucks in a practical cause and effect level, but this process is necessary when you look at it in the context of this very case. If this case were to go south for this guy, you don’t want the precedent to forever be that this behavior is illegal on its face. Especially when decided by potentially one single judge. There has to be a path for a more balanced group of individuals to fix blind spots like that.
Another thing that complicates this is that America isn’t functionally just one nation with a set of laws and federal judges and a constitution, it’s 50 countries each with their own distinct laws, their own constitution, and their own judges. Federal law is just a loose binding box that’s supposed to keep the 50 states from getting too wacky.
Yet – somehow – the selectively of enforcement is too vague to let Americans become aware of it.
I didnt think they taught americans how to read or comprehend any more. Its no wonder they are all trapped on tictok or foxnews.
They really don’t.
I have been saying for a couple years now that there’s a distinct lack of critical thinking here in the US, and it’s mostly due to our education system being built to teach you to be compliant and get you used to a strict schedule with a bell, much like at old factory jobs.
I thought most of the schooling system was to build engineers in the 50s then it got moved to worker drones (corp not blue collar) and now its just take their money and run. But over all of this, the idea of dont question and consume seems to be the bedrock .
In my understanding the framework for the modern public school system (K-12) in the US was developed near the turn of the 20th century to basically be a school-factory pipeline, which is why we see the strict bell structure of classes and lunch as well as beginning/end of day, and the entirely authoritarian approach of teachers who take the attitude of “Don’t do that because I said so” instead of actually showing and teaching the students why they should behave and meeting them where they’re at, and then are surprised when students continue to misbehave and blame overworked parents for their kids’ bad behavior when the system we live under requires parents of school-age children to be absent for the majority of their children’s childhood just to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. More recently with the rise of the prison-industrial complex public schools in lower-income areas have also become a sort of school-prison pipeline, especially for minority students.
now its just take their money and run
As far as colleges and universities, this is absolutely correct. Most of the students now that go through any college but especially community colleges and such will sadly never get a job in the field that they’re studying for, and will end up in the service sector, which actually is what happened to me.
Stare decisis is, and has always been, for suckers.
bUT If YOu got tO ChiNA, THey WilL TrAcK yOu!
I don’t want to be tracked by any country.
If people are doing even tiny things like covering their laptop camera, or disconnecting their TV from the internet it means they don’t want it either.
China is still way worse but we certainly are barreling down that track…
Is it really worse?
Cameras that track you everywhere you go Both
Digital tracking and spying Both
Government that targets political dissidents Both but united states is worse
But China also has healthcare and housing your average person can afford alongside a lower crime rates.
This is mainly intended to cause you to think about it and I will accept if I am incorrect on one of the things I said here but it is kinda my stance on it
As yet, your posts about the goverment on Facebook or X don’t effect your credit score in the US.
China also does genocide
Nope. That country committing genocide told you China is commiting genocide, and you seem to believe this very trustworthy source.
No they don’t.
Let’s agree to disagree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China
As does USA, and continues to do so against it’s own native people. Usa and China are not so different.
To be fair, pretty easy to argue the US did that to native Americans. Then built a country on slave labour, only giving the black population voting rights in living memory. Right now, racism is increasing and in the open again. Push by billionaires not wanting people to notice they have all the money.
China is an authoritarian vision of a future no one wants.
Neither country is the good guys really.
[Says the European Brit, knowing our imperial past, some of which is also in living memory.]
China is an authoritarian vision of a future no one wants.
Is it? They have less intense surveillance than us, they have social healthcare and housing and as a whole a robust social safety net, they’ve eliminated extreme poverty for their billion citizens, and their economy is making a distinct green transition and is outpacing the entire rest of the world. They have long term sustainability, which is more than I can say of any western nation.
As yet, social media posts don’t effect you credit score in the US. Or have a great firewall. Though having sonehthing like ICE is a big step back being a country of rule of law. As is an attempted insurrection. And a lot else Trump is doing.
Haven’t read the article yet but I’d bang him
Article doesn’t load
The irony that a site called 404 doesn’t load for you 😄 here you go op. · Jul 28, 2026 at 1:27 PM 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. ‘The Government Hopes To Set a Precedent’: An Interview With the Man Charged for Allegedly Wiping His GrapheneOS Phone Images: Samuel Tunick and 404 Media. In charging a man for allegedly typing in a duress password which wiped his privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone, the U.S. government is trying to intimidate other activists from protecting their data and participating in social movements, Samuel Tunick, the man charged, told 404 Media in an interview on Tuesday.
The case of Tunick, who participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, has resonated across privacy and civil liberties circles. 404 Media first broke news of the case in December. Last week, The Guardian reported additional details including from a court hearing in the case. The maximum sentence for the alleged crime is five years in federal prison.
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Looks like the article didn’t load for you either. You just posted a couple paragraphs
Sorry, that’s a you problem.
Nope, it’s a problem with this site.
Please don’t post links to inaccessible sites like this one. It harms our communities
Loads fine for me. You’re jumping to conclusions.
You’re making assumptions.
Now try it in a text based browser. Or a security hardened browser.
404media always has this problem. We need to start banning people who link to them
Is Vanadium not considered hardened? I’m also doing some DNS filtering. No issues.
We need to start banning people who use intentionally hobbled browsers and then complain that other people should be banned for sharing sites that they’ve broken.
Nope. It’s a you problem. Site works fine for everyone else.
Whether it loads or not, it is paywalled
That’s a very different issue from not loading.
Pro tip: Copy/paste the article text into the post body, and you don’t have to waste your time arguing
No it’s not. If it’s pay walled, then the article does not load.
We can’t read the article. It’s not accessible. It doesn’t load
No, it’s paywalled.
