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US government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Concern over US effort to prosecute Sam Tunick, accused by authorities of wiping his phone using GrapheneOS

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[–] 88 points 3 months ago (12 children)

The headline is misleading. They're not prosecuting him for using GrapheneOS; they're prosecuting him for using a duress code to erase data when they wanted to search it.

That's also bad, but it's a different set of facts. If he had simply refused to provide access, they would have seized his phone, but wouldn't have this particular creative charge to prosecute.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Is shutting down your phone considered tampering with evidence? It wipes the key from memory

    What about lockdown mode?

    This is a slippery slope

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    In my opinion a duress code should wipe the phone invisibly. So the cops shouldn’t even know it wiped the real data off the phone. Like if you type a duress code it should open the phone with an alt account on a different data partition and hide the partition of the other account and delete it in the background and then zero out the storage drive of that partition so they can’t retrieve the data with forensic tools. You use one account for normal everyday stuff. And the other account for shit the fascists will hang you for.

    A phone that is empty when they unlock it is sus as fuck.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Carry a second phone.

    Do all your non-sus stuff on one phone, do all your sus stuff on the other phone.

    You're going to sell your old phone and start using this one. You just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

    As much as I don't trust Samsung, they have an encrypted profile and you can put all of your social media over there and just wipe knox if you need it, having empty knox on Samsung was probably the default.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    The way profiles work right now makes a decoy profile not work properly. GrapheneOS developers don't add features that can be defeated by basic training.

    Last I heard, the way the developers want to do it is add an early boot passphrase and then a decoy setup would be possible without leaving a way for attackers to be able to know for sure that a decoy feature was used.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    using a duress code to erase data

    Just for my information, is that possible on androids without grapheneOS?

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I do not believe that it is

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yes there are apps called durress and sentry and wasted amongst others. But eventually it become built in the graphene operating system by default. No different than find my device delete or other methods. It's just any data deletion is a law breaking charge.

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