US Government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system

1attice

Quick 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

ImJamal

It 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.

RetroTechie

Sounds 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.

bdcravens

"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

m463

This is a technical problem. Instead of wiping and rebooting, it should wipe while showing a lame spreadsheet application, or possibly a grocery list.

cogman10

This 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.

bonkusbingus

This 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 [2] https://grapheneos.org/faq#encryption [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSPM-7