Privacy

The US thinks it's a lot of things it isn't, and really has never been. A democracy for example.

Im not puzzled, theyre hypocrites. They want for themselves but not for others. Its the entire core of their beliefs.

Came here to say this. It's like taking a note out of your own pocket and ripping it up. What's actually the criminal offence?

The police just want to go on a fishing expedition on your data. Just try kicking in the doors of their house to do the same thing.

IKR - if there were genuine concerns that this guy might have something nefarious on his phone, surely they should confiscate it and pass it on to their tech guys to try to backdoor or whatever. Instead, this shit finger just types in whatever he's told and oops, he deleted any potential evidence.

Not sure there's a realistic way they don't notice. It takes time to wipe things and then the phone is empty. I feel like they'll figure it out.

This is a very common complaint, and the main reason is that it's way more complicated than it sounds. The duress feature is designed to immediately erase any chance to recover the unencrypted data from the phone by destroying part of the data used to derive the decryption keys (the other part being your pin/password, which can't be destroyed for obvious reasons). Any attempt to boot into a fake OS would be obvious to anyone familiar with the OS, thus making it effectively security theater. Not to mention the waste of space maintaining a fake OS, which would require fully featured apps and settings, all of which would have to be designed to pass verified boot, which means you can't actually destroy the original OS the way they do.

There's currently no known way to extract data from a locked GrapheneOS device, especially once it's in BFU, unless you've heavily reduced the default security measures, so the duress pin/password is likely unnecessary unless the danger of someone accessing the data is greater than the punishment for destruction of the data.

Also, the "big flashy rebooty show" is less of a feature and more of an unintended happenstance caused by the device immediately losing critical data and being forced to restart. The articles make it sound flashier than it is. It looks more like the device is powering on but the screen keeps disconnecting for a second, before going black.

That's actually a good use of onboard LLMs imo

Give it a short innocent history, have it generate stuff.

Do what their president does, fill the air with so much shit that you can't tell what's real anymore.

The whole thing is just for show, I don't believe they expect to win this, it's a message to anyone who wants to try on the future "we will try to destroy your life if you resist even slightly"

They are claiming he destroyed evidence.

Evidence of what? What crime did he commit that you are searching the phone for evidence? If you don't believe a crime occurred, not only do you not have a reason to search the phone, but it doesn't matter if he took out a hammer and smashed it to little bits, it's his own property and he's free to do with it what he likes. He wanted to wipe it, and he got it wiped. What you wanted in that moment didn't matter in the slightest since you have no probable cause to search, no crime committed, no reason to baselessly charge someone for destroying something that doesn't exist.

It sounds exactly as ridiculous as someone being charge only with resisting arrest. If the person had provably done a crime worth arresting, that charge would be there as well.

That person was literally an American though. I suspect they don't have another country they can legally stay in long term.

Except that, IIRC, it was not he, but an agent, who entered the duress PIN. He would have had to make a statement giving that PIN, and that statement would not be admissible if he weren't read his rights. If the only evidence of destruction of evidence was a statement he supposedly made, then how will they prove that he made it if it is inadmissable? This is, of course, pretending we live in the world of Faerie, where laws, the constitution, and silly things like "legal precedent" still have meaning.