Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

Anyone that is surprised by this or somehow thinks this is new clearly hasn't crossed the border a whole lot. I grew up in a city along the US/Canada border. You don't fuck around with US Customs (or Canadian) agents. My cousin (not always so friendly) pissed off a US Customs agent (in the 90s mind you) and they promptly took his car and disassembled much of it looking for non-existent drugs. When they put it back together it was never the same. Their job is to be suspicious, 99.999% of the time people are completely innocent. But let 1 bad person through and it's Customs' fault for whatever bad thing they do. Not an easy job. Not an excuse for how they can misbehave either.

Is it right? It makes no difference, Customs can make your life miserable, that's just the reality of it, always has been and it can't have gotten better in recent times.

Isn't that an illegal law though? After all you are not required to aid in the prosecution against yourself, aka you don't have to incriminate yourself. So such a law means that the courts now ignore that law/amendment. Doesn't this make it illegal on this point alone?

Either way the USA needs to stop abusing its citizens. The people need to take back control over the court system. Way too much abuse is happening here. Land of the free no more.

One more reason to not go to the US

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

FAFO

[flagged]

The land of the free!

[flagged]

Yet another case that will waste the court's time and money. All this is doing is keeping defense lawyers pocket's lined.

At this point, people should buy a burner phone when going to/from the US. In that phone only have a couple of phone numbers and that's it.

I don't agree with all this and this increasingly fascist regime but... this was the most predictable outcome. Consider these two scenarios.

1. You factory reset your phone before entering the US and give it to CBP blank. There's nothing to find;

2. You have a self-destruct PIN like this guy did and give it CBP so it destroys the phone's contents.

Tech people will say that these two things are functionally the same. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the law works. If you factory reset your phone first with the intention of restoring it after entry, that's completely fine (legally). You could've factory reset that for any reason. But as soon as an officer wants to search your phone, now you're engaging in evidence destruction (spoliation). The destruction to the phone's contents was done in response to an unfortunately lawful search.

Even if you don't want to factory reset your phone, you can probably just delete (or even log out) of key apps. They can still get messages but if you're so concerned about that, use WhatsApp or whatever.

None of this should be necessary but we are where we are. But whatever you do, don't use a self-destruct PIN if you don't want to be charged with a felon and likely to be found guilty.

If the government wants you no amount of technical gotchas will prevent this.

And you still believe you have more freedom than China and Russia.. *thumbs up emoji*

Y'know, makes me wonder why Democrates didn't disband ICE and CBP when they had control over the Congress and the government. I mean, they knew those agencies would be used in precisely this way, yet did nothing anyhow.