US Charges Traveler for Wiping Phone With a Duress PIN at the Border

Federal prosecutors in the United States have charged an Atlanta resident with intentionally destroying evidence by entering a panic password that wiped his smartphone during a border inspection, according to reporting cited from TechCrunch.

The defendant, Samuel Tunick, was subjected to a secondary screening at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on January 24, 2025, upon returning from abroad. His defense team confirmed his device ran GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused security fork of Android commonly used on Google Pixel phones. The system includes a duress feature that permanently deletes user data if an emergency PIN is typed.

According to court filings, when Tunick entered a PIN at border agents' request, the screen went dark, flashed several times, and rebooted clean. Agents seized the wiped hardware anyway and admitted him into the country.

The government later indicted Tunick under a federal statute criminalizing the intentional destruction of property to prevent official seizure. Legal and security specialists, including staff from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted this appears to be the first known federal prosecution involving an operating system's built-in wipe code.

Tunick has pleaded not guilty. His public defenders filed a motion to suppress all evidence, arguing border authorities held him without access to an attorney and demanded phone access under the pretext of child exploitation inquiries, while actually probing his ties to environmental protests against Atlanta's police training facility. The US maintains it needs no search warrant at border checkpoints, where constitutional protections are routinely curtailed.

A federal judge in Atlanta is expected to rule on the motion to suppress later this year.

Source: habr

Reporting via: TechCrunch