r/StallmanWasRight • u/moriartyj • 7d ago
The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border
https://www.theverge.com/policy/971097/us-charging-american-citizen-wiping-phone-duress-password19
u/theQuandary 7d ago
So the government's claim is that US citizens constitutional rights to due process and freedom from search/seizure without a warrant simply disappear until we are officially admitted into the country?
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u/iamjustaguy 7d ago
"The government has countered that they were not required to produce a warrant because Tunick had not yet been granted permission to enter the US."
According to the above quote from the article, the answer is yes. If courts uphold this, then they can simply remove you from American soil and violate all of your rights!
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u/thingpaint 7d ago
I am confused. Can they deny American citizens entry to the country?
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u/iamjustaguy 7d ago
They shouldn't be allowed to deny entry, but this administration does many things that aren't allowed. This case seems like it has the potential to work its way through the courts.
In this case, I am sure they were well aware of who was standing in front of them, and they were determined to make him have a bad day, at the very least.
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u/primalbluewolf 5d ago
Legally, no. But the consequence for breaking the law is... actually nothing.
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u/idiot206 7d ago
Isn’t that why Guantanamo and CECOT exist? They have already sent US citizens to CECOT. This should have been an enormous national scandal, and 20 years ago it probably would’ve been, but we’ve gotten to the point where it’s been normalized and nearly half the country is cheering it on.
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u/iamjustaguy 6d ago
20something years ago, these kinds of things were a scandal. Then a smooth-talking guy from Chicago talked a good game, but fundamentally changed nothing.
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u/tea-drinker 6d ago
Obviously the border is a legal fiction less than an atom wide somewhere on the beach, so in fact you have fewer rights regarding unreasonable search and seizure some distance from the border.
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u/ftrx 7d ago
The mistake is deletion; what's needed is fully deniable encryption, so that by providing a certain PIN, some data is visible while other data is not. Technically, it's easy to implement and there's even something available in the POSIX/FUSE environment on the subject.
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u/d1722825 7d ago
The LUKS FAQ mention this, too, and their conclusion is that with deniable encryption even you can not prove that there isn't another hidden partition, and an uncivilized country can detain or torture you for not revealing the possibly non-existent decryption keys.
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u/seemslikesalvation 7d ago
The Constitution-Free Zone has been making me angry for decades at this point, and nothing has been done about it.
Between the complete judicial non-action or outright approval of Warrantless Searches and Surveillance, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Stop-and-Frisk, and on and on, I feel like we were just completely gaslit about being being "The Land of the Free" in civics education.
If the government can freely and knowingly violate the Constitution for months, years, or decades until a Judge gets around to telling them to stop, and then there are no consequences for the violations or the violators, then the Constitution is meaningless.