[bambax]

A little OT but strongly related: in France you can go to prison if you refuse to give your phone's password to the police (nothing like a "free country", I guess).

Is there a way to set up a phone so that typing a "special" password puts the phone in an alternate state with different apps and content, etc. (and possibly erase the regular content)?

[flangola7]

- I presume that's considered willful destruction of evidence and interfering with an official investigation, and worse charges than whatever you were probably facing (unless you really did fuck up and committed something bad).

- Investigators are not going to be typing your password into the running original device, they're going to be trying it against an offline clone of the encrypted storage. All that will happen is the decryption won't succeed and they'll tell you that it was the incorrect password and continue holding you until you give it up.

- This is hardly unique to France, US courts have jailed suspects for refusing to provide passwords in numerous cases. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef...

[bambax]

> Investigators are not going to be typing your password into the running original device, they're going to be trying it against an offline clone of the encrypted storage

Oh no, absolutely not. We're not talking about "investigators" here, just random cops in a random precinct who have zero infrastructure, zero knowledge about anything, and aren't pursuing any serious "investigation".

They will absolutely type your password into the running device. They're doing this all the time.

[godelski]

On point 3, while I agree he shouldn't be required to give up his password, we should note that they did find child porn on other devices and that there is testimony from another witness of more porn on those hard drives. I'm just saying that this is a bit different than there being no sufficiently prosecutable evidence and the courts requiring it. In fact, that's why they claim his 5th Amendment rights aren't violated (though obviously the length of his sentence relies upon that). He could currently be prosecuted under the current evidence, and that matters.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/rawls...

[vhcr]

About point 2, modern devices have a secure enclave, which means that copying the encryption key is pretty much impossible.

[flangola7]

Impossible for the average thief, not impossible for government or Fortune 500 actors. There are private contractors in business solely dedicated to developing and licensing enclave cracks, and popping them is routine procedure for most law enforcement departments, even smaller ones.

Fundamentally you can't have a key and the data inside the same physical box and expect encryption to remain intact. Enclaves are just security through obscurity on steroids.

[ElDji]

You simply comply and give your phone PIN that somehow doesn’t work.