[xg15]

I don't know, that sounds like the kind of "I'm not touching you" defense that I don't think will convince anyone with common sense. It's obvious the wipe turned a search that could potentially find something into a useless search, so I don't see why the two should be treated as equivalent.

[8note]

common sense is that CBP should not be searching citizens phones in order to pick a kill list for ICE to go killing first amendment protected protestors.

it's ridiculous on the face of it that that guys phone should be searched at all

[daveidol]

This is an absurd statement. A “kill list”? Please.

[LadyCailin]

I would have thought the fourth amendment not having specific geographical boundaries, but rather applying generally would have been common sense too, but here we are with border patrol being able to force you to reveal your PIN code just because you transited a border.

[itake]

Imagine a safe containing sealed envelopes written in a code that only the owner understands.

The police ask for the combination.

The owner provides a combination that opens the safe, but the safe’s security mechanism first destroys its contents. The police can now inspect the safe but there are no documents left.

Even if the documents had remained, they would still have been written in an indecipherable code unless the police also had the codebook.

This person was complicit with the search: he gave the police access to search the safe.

[xg15]

You're making two arguments here, and I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think any of them would convince a judge.

> The owner provides a combination that opens the safe, but the safe’s security mechanism first destroys its contents. The police can now inspect the safe but there are no documents left.

> This person was complicit with the search: he gave the police access to search the safe.

The problem is that it's very obvious the police didn't want access to the safe because they like opening safes but to get the documents inside. The person denied that intent.

> ... written in a code that only the owner understands.

> Even if the documents had remained, they would still have been written in an indecipherable code unless the police also had the codebook.

This is an orthogonal argument basically saying "if the documents had also been encrypted, then there would have been no difference between destroying the documents and just leaving them encrypted".

First, that's not what was the case in the original situation - there is nothing saying there was secondary encryption on the phone.

Second, obviously, destroying documents and encrypting them is not equivalent because in the second case there is still an option to try and brute-force the code or try to decrypt them in another way.

[itake]

> there is nothing saying there was secondary encryption on the phone.

A GrapheneOS phone stores its files encrypted. The PIN is not itself the encryption key; it is used, together with a high-entropy secret protected by the Titan M secure element, to derive the material needed to unlock the randomly generated filesystem-encryption keys.

The duress PIN does not overwrite every file. It irreversibly destroys the multiple layers of key material and encryption metadata needed to decrypt the data, making any encrypted remnants effectively unreadable.

A hypothetical, extraordinarily powerful quantum computer could theoretically decrypt the remaining ciphertext by searching for the encryption keys.