7 ms·
Amendment 4: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be viol
by 34679 1mo ago
Amendment 4:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Amendment 5:
"..nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
- gruez 1mo ago>Amendment 4: He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search >Amendment 5: Destroying evidence isn't testimony. Moreover he would have been in the clear if he just kept his mouth shut.
- Varelion 1mo ago[flagged]
- gruez 1mo agoPlease try again with an actual argument rather than attacking people based on which "side" I'm on.
- Varelion 1mo ago[flagged]
- gruez 1mo ago"obese nazis"?
- Humorist2290 1mo agoIs there any question the person who was baselessly charged with CSAM, then terrorism when they realized it was so obviously untenable, as a pretense to detain him would've been treated differently if he were on a different "side"?
- gruez 1mo ago>the person who was baselessly charged with CSAM, then terrorism Source? Are we still talking about Samuel Tunick? The article doesn't mention it, and so far as I can tell he was only charged at the border crossing for obstruction.
- SauciestGNU 1mo agoNot "charged" as in indicted but the search was based on an accusation that he had CSAM on the device. But his political proclivities make it pretty transparent that CSAM was an invented excuse to investigate and punish a political dissident.
- krapp 1mo ago"Evidence" of what, exactly? What specific crime did they expect to find evidence of on his phone?
- myrmidon 1mo agoThey were pretty obviously hoping to find a specific crime to accuse him of (because he is a protester against the Atlanta "Cop City" thing). But no respectable judge would ever have issued a search warrant on the basis of "we want to rifle through his messages/contacts so we can hopefully accuse him of something". Protesters against this exact same thing were mis-prosecuted under "domestic terrorism" and "racketeering" charges before (got dismissed in 2025).
- josefritzishere 1mo agoEvidence of what? Destroying evidence assumes he is guilty of a crime which there be evidence of. Our system is predicated on an assumption of innocence. The normal threshold to accuse is a "reasonable, articulable suspicion." This does not meet that criteria.
- gruez 1mo agoWell that's the thing with destroying evidence. If you destroyed it, it becomes harder (or impossible) to prove you did the crime. That's why it's not uncommon for people to be only charged with stuff like "obstruction of justice" rather than the actual crime they allegedly did.
- tosti 1mo agoBut you can't assume someone committed a crime.
- mingus88 1mo agoIn this case, the authorities are claiming they were looking for CSAM. So wiping the phone hindered a valid investigation. They can say anything they want. They hold all the power. This will never change until enough people take matters into their own hands, as the system has been compromised.
- Capricorn2481 1mo agoThey think a well known protester who was savvy enough to wipe their phone was crossing the border with CSAM on their phone? Do people buy this shit?
- rootusrootus 1mo agoThe evidence on your phone may be against someone else, not you. Still evidence.
- bot403 1mo ago
- hamper653 1mo ago> He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search Evidence with regard to which investigation?
- someguydave 1mo agoBorder agents are entitled to investigate anything for any reason more or less
- wnmurphy 1mo agoIf you are a US citizen, they are not entitled to your unlocked phone. They need a judicial warrant if they want you to unlock your phone with a PIN/password. It is settled case law that that falls under your protections under the 14th Amendment. They can take it for a "reasonable amount of time" (inconvenience you for a few hours and make you miss your connecting flight) while they copy an encrypted image. They then must return it to you.
- someguydave 1mo agoYes but you are also not allowed to destroy evidence
- hamper653 1mo agoThere can’t be evidence if there is neither a crime nor an investigation.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- hamper653 1mo agoBut did they? Was there an actual investigation going on?
- encomiast 1mo ago
- sgc 1mo agoIt seems like the best course of action would be to argue he did not destroy evidence, just made it unavailable at the location to force the requirement for a search warrant. It would probably be a hard sell, but I can't think of a better argument (not a lawyer).
- cube00 1mo ago> Moreover he would have been in the clear if he just kept his mouth shut. Although then you get a possible delay of undefined duration, additional questioning and seizure of your device.
- rootusrootus 1mo agoWhat's the longest a citizen (with all appopriate documentation on them) has been held by border patrol after refusing to answer any questions? A quick search failed to get me a solid answer to this, other than a general suggestion that 72 hours is probably the practical upper limit (but no statutory limit necessarily exists), and CBP policies say 12 hours. I'm interested to know about specific examples. Aside from extraordinary cases where the gov't is pretty sure they're dealing with a bona fide terrorist, my expectation is that CBP mostly isn't really that interested in detaining people indefinitely just for the lulz. They're probably just going to say "okay, fine, we're taking the phone, here's your receipt for it, get lost" and let you go on your way.
- fedpost 1mo agoProblem is, he didn't destroy shit. "He" (by which I mean, technically the agents) deleted a header that's used to encrypt data but can restored from a backup.
- MBCook 1mo agoDeleting isn’t destroying?
- fedpost 1mo agoSure, but the issue is he didn't delete his data, he deleted a header with a key in it, that's it, just a few MB. He didn't delete hundreds of GB of chats or browsing history, he deleted a key to access it and that key isn't necessarily the only one that can access it. All the stuff they want can still be accessed just fine if another copy of the key exists. To put it in protective, just opening a web browser or some other app can delete/alter more data than was deleted in this case.
- MBCook 1mo agoThat’s semantics. For all intents and purposes he destroyed it, no different than if he stomped on the phone or deleted all the files traditionally. I don’t think a judge would care about splitting that hair.
- fedpost 1mo agoKind of? Let's say he has a detached header on another device and deleted the one on his phone. It's not at all destroyed now. Is what he did still illegal? This is important because this is a feature of some crypto systems like LUKS. You can have your header on another physically septate device. If this is ruled on in an insufficiently nuanced way it could have very significant implications for carrying encrypted data without the key.
- tmp10423288442 1mo ago
- robviren 1mo agoBut the bar for hauling someone to court and defacto punishing them financially and smearing them in the eyes of the public is so low. And the path to getting compensation for wrongful prosecution so fraught. What an easy tool the justice system is to punish uppity citizens thinking they don't have a king.
- cucumber3732842 1mo agoYou think they'll see a courtroom? Ha! If they're lucky they'll get there in 5yr and $15k. When the administrative enforcement bureaucracies want to harass you they'll hit you with some ruinously expensive civil fine BS. No court will give a crap about you until you've exhausted a bunch of appeals, which you of course appeal to the same agency that's trying to screw you. Only after years of that (and invariably legal fees, because you can't go it alone), do you sue them and get to see a real courtroom. But even then, this is a civil matter, not a criminal one, so all your rights have been nerf'd and there's a hundred years of precedent and case law that tilt things in their favor. If you get lucky, they'll settle and you'll only be out a few tens of thousands for the ordeal.
- someothherguyy 1mo agoyou don't have those protections at the border: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
- OutOfHere 1mo agoThere is no such exception allowed in the Constitution. And if a case is made that they're not legally in the US yet, then by the same logic, they should not be subject to all the same laws of the US yet.
- empressplay 1mo agoThe Supreme Court has long recognized a border-search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. In United States v. Flores-Montano, the Court looked to the nation’s sovereign “interest in protecting . . . its territorial integrity” to justify such searches.3 In United States v. Montoya de Hernandez, the Court stated, somewhat more narrowly, that Congress is the source of the executive’s power. It explained that “[s]ince the founding of our Republic . . . [Congress has] granted the Executive plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border, without probable cause or a warrant.” The Commerce Clause permits Congress to authorize the seizure of goods at the border. https://yalelawjournal.org/forum/customs-immigration-and-rights https://yalelawjournal.org/forum/customs-immigration-and-rig...
- superxpro12 1mo agoI see a vast gulf between searching a truck of produce driven by a non-citizen vs intercepting a citizen at the boarder with known affiliations with the opposing political party. And it's impossible to ignore that context. This is plainly wrong. And people trying to justify this plainly fascist search is sickening.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
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- jfengel 1mo agoThe original text is basically useless. They're more like a mission statement rather than directives. They set up broad aspirations, but the implementation has to be aggregated over literally millions of pages of judicial decisions. Even lawyers with extremely different ideologies will give you convergent answers in a lot of cases, even when those answers conflict with an apparently obvious reading of the original text. Explaining that would require drilling down into details of thousands of court cases -- like reading a complex proof of a seemingly simple theorem. I don't like that any more than you do. It's not mathematics, and even when given all the details, I usually find their inferences laughably bad -- even when I agree with the conclusion. It's not "logic" as I apply it as a logician, philosopher, or software developer. Lawyers (people on my side ideologically) will insist on the soundness of reasoning for decisions that they don't like but accept as valid. So I don't find quoting the Constitution to be of any utility. None of those words what you think they mean. And fixing that requires basically throwing out the entire system of American jurisprudence. Which would be fine with me, to be honest.
- tempodox 1mo ago> None of those words what you think they mean. And that alone is already a pretty scandalous problem. If the law is not stated in a way that ordinary people can understand, how the hell are they supposed to obey it? Those who cannot afford the highly paid law explainers are basically locked out of society.
- krapp 1mo agoI don't think you're entirely wrong, but the Constitution binds the government, not citizens. The government can damn well afford to know what the 4th and 5th Amendments mean.
- bad_haircut72 1mo agoThe words are actually extremely clear and its exceptionally prudent to quote them, because nobody with a brain can read them and fail see that the government is simply being unconstitutional - all over the place. Even when the people are powerless, we dont have to give up our powers of seeing the truth. Your post and this whole idea that "the words dont mean what they say they mean" is frankly doublespeak of the lowest form.
- joshka 1mo agoI'm just guessing here, but the most problematic word on the 4th amendment to attack from the government's perspective is "unreasonable". It's easy to see how a phone border search could be construed as reasonable, and (without digging into this deeply) I suspect that's where most of the push back on this will be. I suspect the 5th amendment is probably more valuable to the defense here as the password is effectively testimonial and the give us your password or we'll ... is compelled speech. Either way, it's gonna be many 10s of thousands of dollars in lawyers fees to fight this. Which sucks.
- Erem 1mo ago> It's easy to see how a phone border search could be construed as reasonable I'm curious, is there any case law from the pre digital age regarding people forced to open their briefcase and let the border guard read all their documents at a port of entry?
- anon84873628 1mo agoYou should check out the LegalEagle video on the case. Covers all these interesting questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rokxux5cU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rokxux5cU