Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It
Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It
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Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It
107 comments
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If anyone is interested in having a feature to wipe your phone, GRAPHENEOS has a duress pin option that will wipe your phone from the lock screen and leave only the OS installed. AFAIK this us only available on Google Pixel devices like the gentleman in the article had.
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As someone who accidentally entered the duress pin, I can confirm. It's highly effective.
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"Hey, babe. Let me look at your text messages."
"Uh, sure, let me just 'unlock' it."
"Wait, why did you say that with quotes?'
"Oh, bad news, hun, seems my phone wiped itself."
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This arrest is the best damn advertisement ever
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It'd be fascinating to see how this plays out in the courts.
Technically it'd be the officers themselves performing the wipes, right? Could you say you got the pins mixed up in your head and get away with it?
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I think the prosecutor is going to drop the charges because I don't think he broke a law. So we'll not find out..
But also, the defendant doesn't have to prove anything and would probably be wise not to testify in court. If you decide that you're going to testify at all, then they can ask you a lot of other questions that you probably don't want to answer. So almost all of the time you should shut the fuck up. :-)
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My work phone has enabled "wipe if pin is wrong three times".
I discovered after my son wiped it three times. I must though it was defective and asked for replacement
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I beleve this feature was demonstrated in Mr. Robot at one point.
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I need to hurry up and install that
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We don't know the exact circumstances, but CBP stands for Customs and Border Protection.
I've heard of Customs agents demanding people let them search phones without a warrant and without probable cause, and so foreigners can be refused entry. We probably all heard the story of it happening for a person who had a meme of JD Vance on his phone.
But the article says that this guy is based out of Atlanta, so I'm guessing he's a US citizen. I'm not sure they can refuse entry to a US citizen based on this.
Either way, you should never give permission to anybody to search your phone. Maybe you've broken a law that you didn't know was a law, and you've just handed the evidence over to the police. Or maybe you have evidence that can convict somebody else who didn't know they broke a law.
I don't know what this means for people crossing the US border. Now is a bad time to enter the United States.
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Legally, they cannot refuse entry to a US Citizen. Legally.
But just because someone is based in the US doesn't mean they're a citizen. And they don't need any justification to search someone, because airports and land within 100 miles of a border is a "constitution-free zone" (but not 100 miles from an airport, contrary to popular belief).
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Lmao so now we're saying all of Southern California south of Newport Beach (85 mi from Tijuana) is a place where the constitution does not apply? New York west of Rochester? (80 mi from Niagara) Pretty much all of Alaska's tail thingy next to Canada? 😂
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airports and land within 100 miles of a border is a "constitution-free zone"
This isn't accurate. That's where CBP has jurisdiction to operate, but they're still bound by the constitution (for now),
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It does indeed include international airports.
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CBP has higher power than regular police, sadly.
https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/know-your-rights/know-your-rights-us-airports-and-ports-entry
Turns out, no matter who is in charge, we were living under an oppressive regime.
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you should never give permission to anybody to search your phone
Not only does your phone have access to all your social media accounts, email, text, phone logs, but it's also commonly used as a security device (multi factor authentication) to sign in to other accounts like your bank account, work login, etc. If you allow someone into your phone they can possibly access your work resources and that could be an even bigger problem.
Do not let anyone have access to your phone.
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Or they can illegally use it to attack a law abiding person that had photos they dislike. Maybe that's the day they go rogue, maybe they were already crooked.
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Details are weird here. The wiping occurred in Jan 2025. I found the indictment which was filed with the court on Nov 13th 2025 linked here
We have almost no details of what happened in Jan 2025 except "Customs and Border Patrol Tactical Terrorism Response Team" was doing something with Tunick in January and Tunick "used a code" to wipe the phone. Then suddenly in November 2025 the US Government filed to have him arrested for that event.
I'm not a legal scholar, but none of these details or timeline makes sense to me. Anyone else have any clue?
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It's not complicated, it's Border Patrol doing their MAGA duty. The only thing we know about this case is what MAGA tells us, so it's almost all certainly a lie. Of course the details and timeline don't make sense, they are probably entirely fabricated.
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I don't disagree, but usually they at least try to present a semi-defensible argument. So far the only thing they elude to is "before or during a time when we were going to perform a search he wiped his own phone". If its "before" a search then what is even the basis for that being illegal for him to wipe is own property?
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Always turn your phone offer before deplaning and don’t turn it back on until you’ve cleared customs. You can refuse a search and even if they take your phone they still don’t have a method of decrypting a phone that’s encrypted at rest after being turned off and all biometrics are disabled on start up until a password is entered (most phones).
You’ll most likely lose your phone and a few hours but that’s what you have backups for.
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Reminder that Apple/Google will absolutely give law enforcement all your cloud data if presented with a warrant. I know this for a fact. Most people's phone data is synced to the cloud. Be careful out there folks.
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That’s also why I have advanced protection turned on. Granted they could always get the encrypted blob and try to crack it at that point, but there has to be some point you’re willing to draw the line.
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I would fully expect any cloud provider to do the same given a warrant, but I've heard some will provide data simply because it was requested.
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And this is why encrypted backups should become the norm. Sure, they could always try to crack the encrypted file after it gets turned over, but (assuming you have a good password set for your account) we’re talking about a scale somewhere between “a few billion years” and “the heat death of the universe” with conventional (non quantum) computers.
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at this point just leave your phone at home or get burner for this exact purpose
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*presuming you have a strong password set
They can and still will run it through a password cracker with a dictionary provided the phone has some method of either exposing the password hash or can be bruteforced on device similar to PIN bruteforcing.
You can refuse a search
Which can lead to an up to 24 hour detainment which CBP has been allegedly doing, so do know the consequences.
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PIN bruteforcing.
Curious, how does that work? 10000 possibilities aren't many but you get 30s break every 3 failed attempts then 5 more then its every single failed attempts so that'd be ~5000minutes so that's about 3 days. Assuming they get "lucky" it's about 1.5 day. I don't know though what happens after 20 failed attempts, maybe it's 1min break or 20min break.
Basically, does PIN bruteforcing actually work and if so on what timeframe?
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You should read up on Celebrite. They most definitely can get into a wide variety of phones from a cold boot. GrapheneOS seems to be one of the only ones that make their job hard.
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I always wipe my phone before traveling.
There's nothing in my phone that I'd be the least bit worried about "getting out" but it's the principle of the thing.
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107 comments
Without a warrant, CBP wasn't entitled to anything on his phone and they can go fuck themselves.
It's cute that you think there are still laws in the US.
They have to charge him with something.
I was going to say something along the lines of being charged with anything but your statement is way better and more importantly more accurate.
I wasn’t sure if that applies to non-citizens.
Personally, I think it should, but laws aren’t always just.