alt Hacker Newsthe funny part is he didn't enter the pin he gave it to them and they entered it..., not sure if it makes any difference but there is a certain irony to it that it was the non warrant based search actions (which might be legal at the border) which lead to the erasure of data
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I’ve been arguing against some LLMs about this point for a good hour and there’s a whole lot of linking intent to action where you can be liable if a court can prove it. Not that an LLM is legal gold but it’s the best thing I have to pass ideas around with.
The entire situation is sort of nonsensical and boils down to lots of minutia in law that no normal person would know about.
For example having normal widely known security features like wiping the device after N failed PIN attempts is fine. Even having long standing security practices that can’t be related are fine, like having a timed touch point where if you don’t enter the PIN every… 15 days or whatever the device wipes, perfectly fine if it can’t be connected towards the crime and you’re not compelled to tell officers you have such a security mechanism.
Even if you were to set a trap where you use the same PIN for your bank, your laptop, and some other security devices in repetition then decide to set your duress PIN to that by assuming it would be discovered as a probable option they’d use, you’d be ok but it could be questionable if that was by design…
It’s so obscure really as to how and how you’re not allowed to protect your data, even if you’re not the one performing the action to clear destroy the potential evidence yourself. The entire thing seems pretty absurd a frankly arbitrary to me, and I don’t know how people could know which cases are and aren’t legal. I know not to destroy evidence myself but I wouldn’t know to tell someone to not use the duress pin or that even giving them my duress pin could somehow be my liability. It’s madness if you ask me.
Edit for the confused and misinformed: 18 USC 1001. Also, is ≠ ought.
Lying to a federal officer is a crime, IIRC, and if the lie results in destruction of evidence, the person who told the lie is probably accountable for both crimes. This isn't a lie with plausible deniability: you have to set a duress PIN, understanding what it does, and then communicate that PIN instead of the unlock PIN.
A duress PIN to wipe the device don't exist to absolve the owner of liability... It exists for when compromising the device could get people the owner cares about killed or disappeared and the owner considers their own liability, disappearance, or death a preferable outcome.
It is an extreme solution for extreme scenarios. People need to be sober in weighing its use.