Colby Cosh: When destroying your phone lands you in jail
- The case involves Samuel Tunick, a U.S. citizen who used a “duress” password on his GrapheneOS phone that erases all data, given to border guards during a search in January 2025.
- Tunick, linked to the anarchist group “Stop Cop City,” was charged with destruction of property to prevent lawful seizure, marking a novel legal test of duress password use with border authorities.
- The legality of searches and password disclosure at U.S. borders is currently unsettled, with conflicting court interpretations and ongoing debates about Fourth Amendment protections.
- Tunick’s lawyer aims to dismiss the search and erase the duress password incident from the record, emphasizing no evidence of illegal content and framing the case as destruction of property, not evidence.
Interesting times (for civil liberties) corner: last week the Guardian and the news site TechCrunch broke news of a groundbreaking legal case concerning a U.S. citizen’s use of GrapheneOS, an operating system for Android smartphones that allows the user to set a “duress” password. This is a second, secret numerical password that, if entered by a user, will irreversibly eradicate all the contents of the device. Such a failsafe is obviously legal under normal circumstances — but Samuel Tunick, a U.S. citizen, gave the self-destructive password to U.S. border guards who demanded to examine his phone when he was re-entering the country from the Dominican Republic on Jan. 24, 2025.
Tunick, an Atlanta-area musician associated with a local anarchist movement called “Stop Cop City,” has now been charged with “destruction of property to prevent (lawful) seizure” under a little-used provision of the U.S. Code. This is thought to be the first-ever legal test of the use of a duress password in such a setting. It is reasonably clear that the whole incident involved some — well, let’s call it adventurous opportunism by American authorities. Tunick seems to have been on an informal FBI terrorist watch list because of his involvement with “Stop Cop City,” a loose group of super-NIMBYs and police abolitionists who tried to block the creation of a sprawling new training facility in a forested area on the outskirts of Atlanta.
“Stop Cop City,” which managed to create only short delays in the construction of Cop City, really did use illegal and destructive tactics from the eco-terror playbook, and in 2023 a member was killed in an apparent shootout with Georgia state troopers. But when Tunick was detained for questioning and search at the airport, after a hint from the FBI, he was told that the authorities were concerned about child pornography. He demanded to talk to a lawyer, was refused, and only then handed over the phone and gave the officers the duress password. Phone go kablooie.
Was this legal? The law on what agents of the United States can do to citizens re-entering the country is in a state of disarray and conflict at the moment: the view of the government is basically that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply at the border, but different district courts are still trying to define the applicable doctrine. Tunick’s lawyer is trying to impeach the whole search and have Tunick’s use of a duress password thrown out of the record altogether, as if it didn’t happen.
So the legal contest may never get around to the specific and novel question of whether it’s legal to give border authorities a duress password. This is not a destruction-of-evidence case, remember; it’s being litigated as destruction of property to prevent seizure by the state. There’s no evidence at all, not even a bona fide suggestion or indication, that Tunick ever had anything illegal per se on the Android phone. And, after all, he handed over the phone, complete with the false password and the installed OS; it was the border agents’ own physical use of the phone, arguably, that compromised the information they were hoping to fish for.
National Post Twitter.com/colbycosh