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US Government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system
- 1attice 2mo agoQuick reminder to my fellows that if you discuss this story here, it will end up immutable and available to law enforcement and, e.g., H1B eligibility deciders. Dark forest
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- wbl 2mo agoBetter to die on ones feet than live on ones knees.
- 1attice 2mo agoSome of us are on visa and have our online presence routinely scanned these days. Asymmetric vuln. If that's not you, why are you upset when it is acknowledged?
- ThePowerOfFuet 2mo agoHave you considered living somewhere the Sword of Damocles does not constantly hang over your head? Most of the EU is lovely.
- wbl 2mo agoIn America you can call politicians names. In Germany that's a criminal offense
- ThePowerOfFuet 2mo agoI said _most_.
- rbanffy 2mo agoAlso, a lot of us live outside the US and have no protected rights whatsoever when on US soil, at least according to the current regime. So, I ask again: please, my American friends, fix the country. It’s a very nice one, I like it, and I miss visiting you. Your fellow contrypeople deserve better, even if this is what they vote for. I would love to be able to help, but I really can’t.
- margalabargala 2mo agoYou have it backwards. It is better to live on one's feet, than to die on one's knees.
- chirau 2mo agoNope. You have it backwards. It is better to die on one's feet (being brave, and keeping your honor even if that means you dying), than to live on one's knees (living your life in fear and obedience).
- margalabargala 2mo agoWhooosh.
- ImJamal 2mo agoIt looks like there are a lot of issues here on the government side, but it also appears like the protestor intentionally gave them a password that, when used, wipes the phone? That seems like a clear example of destruction of evidence.
- kmoser 2mo agoIt's too bad GrapheneOS doesn't support hidden volumes.
- Cider9986 2mo agoIt can't because it runs on phones which only have SSDs which leave forensic traces. They would like to improve deniability but it must be robust, whatever they implement.
- snypher 2mo agoWhy do you think reporters would rather eat a contempt charge vs throwing their sources to the wolves?
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> That seems like a clear example of destruction of evidence If he was under arrest, sure. The cops claiming this was a routine airport inspection would seem to muddy the waters, at least.
- bootlooped 2mo agoI don't think the crime of destroying evidence / tampering with evidence depends on what your status in custody is. If the police knock on your front door and you start shredding documents, that's still a crime. Now, could that get tossed about because they denied him access to a lawyer? Maybe, I don't know about that part.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> If the police knock on your front door and you start shredding documents, that's still a crime Isn’t the relevant bit whether you think you’re doing crimes and/or being investigated? If I’m shredding while the cops knock on my door because they’re looking for a missing cat, that’s obviously not criminal. (I guess the more-pertinent comparison would be they knock on my door and then I put stuff in the shredder while I check around my home.)
- RetroTechie 2mo agoSounds like a good reason to use alternatives like GrapheneOS. It doesn't take a big % of users to let the "using it is suspicious by itself" nonsense wear off.
- Cider9986 2mo agoIt's already supported by Roblox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994716 2 days ago 87 comments
- delfinom 2mo agoNot to worry, but big tech and government are slowly crafting laws that make non-big-tech operating systems illegal in the name of protecting children.
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- bdcravens 2mo ago"federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City" Talk about burying the lede
- Tyrubias 2mo agoBurying the lede on what? The individual in question was being targeted in part because he was exercising his First Amendment right to protest environmental destruction and the militarization of police. I think if anything this makes it more disturbing. The US government has a long history of criminalizing movements they don't like as "terrorism".
- numeri 2mo agoYou're agreeing with the person you responded to (bdcravens). Burying the lede means that bdcravens thinks the true headline should have been about being put on a terrorist watch list for protesting a police training camp, not about the phone.
- pstuart 2mo agoNote that "antifa" is now recognized as a terrorist organization by the current federal government. It will get much worse if they aren't stopped.
- m463 2mo agoThis is a technical problem. Instead of wiping and rebooting, it should wipe while showing a lame spreadsheet application, or possibly a grocery list.
- woodruffw 2mo agoI don’t think a judge would be impressed by this. If anything it actually makes the legal case easier: there’s a legitimate use for a wiping feature on a phone (e.g. for theft or tampering), but actively producing false information demonstrates an intent to deceive or mislead.
- cherryteastain 2mo agoEasier solution: phone wipes itself if passcode is not entered every X hours
- atoav 2mo agoDeadmans-switch, nice. I always had a weird fascination for that kind of mechanism, because it inverts the whole situation. Where before you have to actively wipe a phone, now them taking your phone may be the mechanism that triggers the wipe.
- bilegeek 2mo agoIs it legally better? Absolutely. But all they have to do is say "they did this as a legal workaround for that" and you're no better off, at least not without spending the same amount on lawyers. You can't out-tech your way around a corrupt system, they will find a way to get you.
- 8note 2mo agoif you have it running constantly, i dont think that argument can be made id expect that youd be ordered to retain the data though, if an investigation is being done
- cogman10 2mo agoThis whole thing highlights how insane US border law is. Sam was physically in the US, but because he was on an international flight, he was arrested in a manner that would be unconstitutional anywhere else in the US. He was denied a lawyer, questioned for I presume hours, had his phone stolen without a warrant, and then was released because there was no crime CBP could figure out how to charge him with then and there. Months later, he gets charged by a federal statute even though where he committed the crime was a place that federal law does? doesn't? extend. Apparently it's a very convenient place where the constitution is void but federal laws still matter. Cops can't arrest or detain you without some articulable suspicion of a crime being committed. They can't steal your stuff to try and find a crime you committed. They can't search your phone without a warrant in which they provide a judge with enough evidence to reasonably suspect a crime has been committed. Yet Sam apparently had no rights because he was put on a watchlist for exercising first amendment rights. Very despicable behavior by the government and the federal prosecutors pursuing this case.
- goatlover 2mo agoIndeed. Hopefully the next administration will hold current officials accountable for such abuses of power.
- donkey_brains 2mo agoYeah, and then they’ll give everyone a pony
- rbanffy 2mo agoIt’s up to the people. If you can convince enough people this is worth voting for, you might accomplish something. It is not always obvious how necessary it is to get involved in politics, even if it is inconvenient, as Mr. Tunick demonstrates. I’m not American and don’t live in the US, so, what I can objectively do is very close to nothing- my advice is pretty obvious and far from unique. It seems many countries have a general low opinion of politics, as something dirty you shouldn’t engage with. We need to overcome that.
- bonkusbingus 2mo agoThis is a good article, and it brings much-needed attention to this case, which so far has not received the level of public awareness that is consummate with seriousness with which the federal government intends to weaken or undermine the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights of every American in prosecuting these bogus charges against Sam. However, it makes an erroneous equivocation that, I believe, has profound technical and legal implications. In the article's first paragraph, it claims that GrapheneOS "enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean". What the author of the article is referring to is GrapheneOS's duress password/PIN feature[1], which does not (contrary to what it may seem on first glance) delete or modify the data on the persistent flash storage phone in any way. What it does is zero the key slots in the phone's Secure Element, which stores the disk encryption keys necessary to decrypt the data on persistent storage (technically, these disk encryption keys are not themselves stored in the secure element, but are first encrypted with a key encryption key/KEK derived from a user-entered passcode/PIN and then stored in the secure element[2]. If an adversary were able to break the secure element and extract the contents of the key slots, they would still need to brute-force the KEK in order to obtain the actual disk encryption keys). To my knowledge, US law does not explicitly say whether deleting the key necessary to decrypt a given ciphertext is equivalent to deleting the ciphertext itself. Technically speaking, they are not equivalent, even if it would take an exorbitant amount of time to recover a deleted key using a brute-force search or some forensic method. If the federal government wants to claim, using this case to set a legal precedent, that it is equivalent, then I would argue that this in effect makes encryption as a concept illegal (as encryption is nothing without the ability of the person using encryption to control access to the encryption key(s)). Reading about the recent Prairieland trial, in which (among other blatant injustices) an activist was convicted by a kangaroo court of "destroying evidence" because they merely removed someone from a Signal group[3], it's clear to me that Prairieland along with Sam's case is part of a coordinated strategy under the NSPM-7 "Antifa Memorandum"[4]: the federal government is using lawfare to establish that it has a right to arbitrarily access the data of its citizens in order to crush political dissent. [1] https://grapheneos.org/features#duress https://grapheneos.org/features#duress [2] https://grapheneos.org/faq#encryption https://grapheneos.org/faq#encryption [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSPM-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSPM-7
- OutOfHere 2mo agoThe technical problem here seems to be that GrapheneOS apparently doesn't support logging in to a partitioned empty OS for scanning purposes, also that it doesn't support such partitions at all, only one of which would be the real one.
- Cider9986 2mo agoIt's not possible to create that feature because GrapheneOS operates under the assumption that an adversary has encyclopedic knowledge of the OS. Currently your suggestion would leave forensic traces so it wouldn't achieve the goal of deniability.
- OutOfHere 2mo agoI find that line of thought to be hilarious and absurd, since even simple encrypted containers on mass-market Android devices work to shield the user. The forensic trace doesn't grant access to the container.
- Cider9986 2mo agoThere's no problem with preventing access on GrapheneOS. It's one of, if not the most, secure operating systems for that purpose. You said that there are no partitions. That's wrong. There are no hidden partitions, because they would be ineffective. You can have up to 32 user profiles with different unlock methods, and within them you can have private spaces which are basically the same as user profiles. User profiles and private spaces are great because they can allow more of your OS to remain BFU, which is more secure than AFU. They are great for security, but they provide no plausible deniability. >The technical problem here seems to be that GrapheneOS apparently doesn't support logging in to a partitioned empty OS for scanning purposes Initially you suggest deniable partitions. I explain that it's not possible to achieve robust deniability that way, because it would leave forensic traces. >since even simple encrypted containers on mass-market Android devices work to shield the user. User profiles and private spaces are encrypted, isolated containers, and they exist on Android and are enhanced by GrapheneOS. The forensic trace doesn't grant access to the container. That is about security, which is already fine. We aren't talking about security; we are talking about deniability. Your suggestion to add fake partitions would not be effective for deniability because it would leave forensic traces. Deniability with hidden partitions is not currently possible on the flash storage used in Pixels and all modern phones, due to wear leveling and many other critical problems inherent to flash memory [1]. [1] https://veracrypt.io/en/Wear-Leveling.html https://veracrypt.io/en/Wear-Leveling.html