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Colby Cosh: When destroying your phone lands you in jail

A U.S. citizen has been charged with destruction of property for giving border agents a 'duress' password that wiped his cellphone

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Interesting times (for civil liberties) corner: last week the Guardian and the news site TechCrunch broke news of a groundbreaking legal case concerning a U.S. citizen’s use of GrapheneOS, an operating system for Android smartphones that allows the user to set a “duress” password. This is a second, secret numerical password that, if entered by a user, will irreversibly eradicate all the contents of the device. Such a failsafe is obviously legal under normal circumstances — but Samuel Tunick, a U.S. citizen, gave the self-destructive password to U.S. border guards who demanded to examine his phone when he was re-entering the country from the Dominican Republic on Jan. 24, 2025. 

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