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I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet over the years say things like “the government can’t make x illegal, it’s just y.” For example, the government can’t

I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet over the years say things like “the government can’t make x illegal, it’s just y.” For example, the government can’t make wiping your phone at the border illegal, it’s just punching four numbers into your phone, just like a pin, only a different four numbers, which could just have well been your pin. U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did. Hell there could have been a third set of four numbers that were the nuclear launch codes. It’s not the fact that it was four numbers, it’s what you were trying to make happen when you typed them. Now of course whether they can prove what your intent was when you typed them is another matter, but generally a duress pin should be for when robbers are breaking into your house, and the government will be on your side, and not when the government will be against you.

halestock 2mo ago
A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.
- hahahaa 2mo ago
  Does anyone think law is computer code? I mean any courtroom drama (even if far fetched) shows it is not.
- steve_taylor 2mo ago
  It reminds me of tax law in many countries. You can follow the letter of the law, but if the vibes are off, you can still be found to be in breach of a vague catch-all provision (e.g. economic substance doctorine in the US, GAAR in Canada/UK, Part IVA in Australia, etc).
  - hahahaa 2mo ago
    UK has systematic tax avoidance IIRC i.e. keep starting and closing businesses to save tax is frowned upon. Australia can treat your capital gains as income if your gains quack like trades. (Maybe now less important since the recent CGT changes).
  - ls612 2mo ago
    To misquote Bismarck, only fools, drunks, and Americans actually believe the rule of law is real.
- lokar 2mo ago
  There is a strong bias by the courts to interpret the law in such a way that it makes sense, and achieves the goals the legislature had when enacting it.
  - Barbing 2mo ago
    Just read this point in a case revolving around the Oxford comma, stated in simple enough legalese I could understand: “laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispu...
- ndiddy 2mo ago
  For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.
  - hahahaa 2mo ago
    This sort of legal workaround can work (see Uber) though. Uber avoided medallions. I guess that proves law is not code!
    - iamnothere 2mo ago
      It depends on how much money you have to grease the wheels.
  - Dylan16807 2mo ago
    They were accused of "public performance" which doesn't make sense to the spirit of the law to begin with. Avoiding technicality via technicality is fine. They should have been allowed to run their thousands of independent servers. The reason cable companies have to pay these fees in the first place is a narrow and somewhat pedantic argument that is entirely based on connecting multiple households to the same antenna. Which Aereo doesn't do, no trickery involved. If there had been a style of "cable" company that used one wire and antenna per house from the start, they could have avoided these fees too. They only didn't exist because cables and antennas are expensive. Any single person could have legally set up their own server and antenna. But Aereo building these en masse makes them a cable company instead of an antenna-building company because... vibes, basically. The best evidence that this was a failure of justice is that they pivoted to "okay, we're cable, we'll pay the fees for a mandatory license" and got rejected for not being a cable company.
- mrtksn 2mo ago
  Maybe this is because of the TV dramas where a genius lawyer saves their client through an obscure technicality. It looks exactly like hacking a system using a 0-day exploit.
- palmotea 2mo ago
  > A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law. It's worse than that: a lot of engineer types reason about almost everything as if it were code. It's a manifestation of Engineer's disease.
  - snovv_crash 2mo ago
    I now see engineers treating people like AI agents. It can always get worse...
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- bubblethink 2mo ago
  It's not that there's a human interpreting the law. It's that there is a politically motivated human interpreting the law, or in other words, you are sol if the state wants to get you. The engineer's arguments aren't reductionist, they are idealistic.
zug_zug 2mo ago
I think people are aware that the government can physically do a lot of stuff, e.g. shoot you in the face for no reason. And vice-versa for that matter. However there are arguments morally, and constitutionally, and logically, about what can be done.
- pennomi 2mo ago
  And all of those arguments are entirely academic, and subject to change depending on economic status, skin color, or nationality. Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate because the alternative is violence. (Well, law is enforced with violence too, I suppose.)
  - wand3r 2mo ago
    Yes, this is something more people really need to take to heart. As Americans are seeing, a lot of rules are unenforceable and really came down to norms and pressure. I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few years and it is roughly encapsulated in this tweet I saw a while back. When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that. This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. High trust societies with less corruption and a strong justice system try to limit these circumstances.
    - mmooss 2mo ago
      > This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. You raise the standard for justice to perfection. There also has never been perfect corruption and anarchy. > Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. That's like saying night has always superceded day. Everyone recognizes that recent years have been very unusual or unique in US history. That means for the great bulk of US history, it was different. Why doesn't 99% of US history outweigh the 1% (picking numbers very loosely) in determining what is somehow inevitable to you. In fact, law is universal among human cultures. We are naturally social and live in groups with rules. Those that violate rules are generally outcasts. But the most fundamental and significant error is attributing the current situation to some unavoidable system instead of the actions of people, especially those that stand aside and allow these things to happen. Many of them stand aside because they are told - probably messaging ultimately from the lawbreakers - that they are powerless and should despair.
sfRattan 2mo ago
> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did. Love this way of putting it. Stealing for future conversations with fellow software developers.
- mh- 2mo ago
  I favorited the comment for the same reason. It's a perfect way of describing it.
  - mikeweiss 2mo ago
    I think it's insulting
    - mh- 2mo ago
      Not sure if you mean to software developers, or to those who are autistic, but I'm both.
      - s08148692 2mo ago
        Same - also thought it was hilarious
    - smrq 2mo ago
      It's kind of funny and also kind of insulting. I'd laugh if a friend said it but said seriously by some rando on the Internet, nah, find a better way to put it.
    - tbrownaw 2mo ago
      What's the less insulting but similarly concise way to make the same substantive point?
      - Lanrei 2mo ago
        Replace autistic with literal.
daishi55 2mo ago
In this case, the government was against him due to his activism against a police training campus. Him deleting his phone was very likely a matter of safety for his fellow activists. Sad that our government does this but it’s not like this guy was a drug dealing or something.
runjake 2mo ago
I'm waiting to see whether he is convicted before I form a strong opinion around this. I'm leaning toward thinking this case will be dropped or at least severely reduced charges.
- chii 2mo ago
  There's a chilling effect from even just the arrest.
  - hahahaa 2mo ago
    Oh this. Poor people lose their job because of an arrest. Arrest = homeless = dead sooner. Best outcome is he successfully sues for the violations.
  - epolanski 2mo ago
    If you're against an academia for further police militarization you're a terrorist apparently. And people are still convinced that's the land of the free, when it's a distorted non-representative democracy on top of a police state. US is closer to South American banana republics than Iceland or Japan.
- surgical_fire 2mo ago
  It doesn't matter. Mamy will read this and think that crossing a border with a GrapheneOS device is a bad idea, or just drop using what is a nice security feature entirely. Just being charged is already a massive pain in the ass (both in terms of stress and costs) to an individual.
  - runjake 2mo ago
    It is a massive pain in the ass, but if the case is thrown out, the gov't may be less likely to arrest someone again. Who knows, under the current regime. They seem to go after whoever they want.
godwinson__4-8 2mo ago
"U.S. law though is highly non-autistic" hilarious but also another point to emphasize is how truly depressing American courts often are. Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psychology show how much peer pressure and other factors extrinsic to the law come into play. Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz. Law is the mask of power. By all means defend and assert your rights, but understand the costs. I find people are under such illusions about how cruel the American justice system is that this leads them to make foolish decisions. Do not underestimate the adversarial nature of the justice system, nor the accompanying incentives agents of the state who are on the other side of you have to lie.
- throwaforfeds1 2mo ago
  > Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz. Indeed. There are certainly parallels between him and Sam Tunick. But I'm not sure the public is ready for all the parallels.
- Hnrobert42 2mo ago
  Is the high success rate because they are good at winning or good at picking winning cases? Does that 90% include plea bargains?
  - Exoristos 2mo ago
    You're begging OP's question.
    - duxup 2mo ago
      I think it’s a valid question as far as what the nature of that success rate is.
    - hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago
      How so? OP is strongly implying that the 90% success rate for prosecutors is due to the courts being stacked against the defense. IMO that is where the logical fallacy is. Since prosecutors have wide latitude in deciding which cases to charge in the first place, it is very possible that the high success rate is due to prosecutors only charging cases where the accused actually committed the crimes being charged. Indeed, for the ~10% of cases where the accused is not found guilty, about 8% are due to the government dropping the case - only 1% are the jury acquitting the defendant outright. Thus, it would appear from that data that when the prosecution sees they are not likely to win a case, they drop it. I'm making no argument that the courts or law are "fair", I'm just making the argument that quoting the 90% number is in no way evidence that courts are inherently biased towards the prosecution.
Georgelemental 2mo ago
A duress pin is useful if the cost of the government getting mad at you because you wiped your data is less than the cost of letting the government have your data. Whether that holds depends on your situation—for example, whether your phone's data could implicate other people that you want to protect
- sqemo 2mo ago
  I think it's a matter of personal privacy. You shouldn't show it to other people.
- ziofill 2mo ago
  When talking about costs we should remember who is paying. Maybe overall the cost of the government getting that data is higher than the cost of them getting mad at you, but when a single individual is paying for all of it the equation might change.
  - 8note 2mo ago
    ultimately everyone is paying the price of reduced rights and freedoms when the government starts wanting to check your phone for wrong-think and harass unofficial enemies of the state
dolphinscorpion 2mo ago
Yes, I had the duress codes but entered them by mistake. I wanted to enter the real one but
- Ajedi32 2mo ago
  If you can convince a jury with that story then it might work. Personally I wouldn't buy it. Would you?
randallsquared 2mo ago
> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic When the judge and officers of the court agree with me, the law is reasonable and just, but when they do not agree with me, the law is arbitrary and capricious. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Having the law be whatever it's thought to be by police, prosectors, judges, and others can lead to obvious injustices, but there's been no serious attempt to remove ambiguity in any country's legal code as far as I know.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 2mo ago
  It’s impossible to remove (even just nearly) all ambiguity. People already complain that there are too many laws on the books.
  - patrick451 2mo ago
    If there were fewer laws, there would be less to disambiguate.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Look at this week's codeberg drama. They wrote a simple law like "no projects that are mostly AI" and all of HN was like "how dare they be so vague? I need to know what percentage of my characters are allowed to be AI! 49.999% is good, right?"
TheDong 2mo ago
This was really well written in "What color are your bits": https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 Programmers have trouble seeing color (two identical numbers are the same bits, how can typing '1234' to unlock one phone be legal, and '1234' to unlock another phone be illegal?) Courts care about color (intent, provenance, permission), even though that color cannot be digitally represented.
- abofh 2mo ago
  Indeed, but should he say his real code was one digit swap off, could you prove intent? Color matters, but you can't paint with only one
  - CJefferson 2mo ago
    This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone. Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.
    - sReinwald 2mo ago
      Framing this as whether he can convince you the mistype was accidental gets it backwards, and "would I believe X or would I think Y" is preponderance, not reasonable doubt - entirely different standard. Reasonable doubt doesn't ask which account you find more likely. It asks whether the innocent one is unreasonable. Take the hypothetical as posed: duress code one digit off, entered while detained after being interrogated for hours, and repeatedly pressured to unlock. The government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he knowingly triggered the wipe and did it for the purpose of impairing the seizure. Nothing about that scenario makes mistyping an unreasonable explanation unless there is more circumstantial evidence that indicates him intentionally providing the wrong PIN. Proving that to a jury looks very hard.
      - 2mo ago
duxup 2mo ago
When I had jury duty it was quite revealing as far as “this is all evidence including people’s testimony, you can believe all or some or none of a given piece of evidence based on your own judgment” goes. When we met it was interesting how our jurors decided “I don’t believe anything that guy says” and so on when it came to their motives and so on. The trial itself was very carefully choreographed, almost pre determined and static. But the decisions and jury activity was very dynamic. There was absolutely no magic legal mechanisms at that point.
Telaneo 2mo ago
Heck, it could be unconstitutional for the government to make X illegal, but if the courts say 'no actually it isn't', or it never actually gets to that point, then it doesn't really matter much, does it? The text of the law could be simple and straightforward, and a layman's reading of that text could be valid, but all the government or courts needs to do is to find some moon logic to make what they need happen, and unless enough people disagree, then that's all there is to it. The law, in many ways, for better or worse, is just a piece of paper.
camel_gopher 2mo ago
Mens rea
refurb 2mo ago
>U.S. law though is highly non-autistic LOL, that made me chuckle. People somehow think they're the first one to think of a workaround to a law, when in fact it's been happening since the first law was written down. The law adjusted and if people think they can do one thing, then claim they intended another they have a big surprise coming.
sandworm101 2mo ago
He should have backed up the phone before travelling then wiped the phone to an innocuous state before getting on the plane. Want to see a really confused border agent? Travel without a phone. Fedex your phone to your hotel/home. Read a book on the plane. The concept that someone doesn't have a phone/computer drives cops insane. One of the wikileaks crew pulled this one in NY. Several agencies were a set to grab his devices and detain him until he unlocked them ... But all he had in his carry-on was a magazine. His devices had been wiped and sent by mail. He re-imaged them only once he was home and safe. No devices to unlock, no reason to detain him.
- account42 2mo ago
  > He re-imaged them only once he was home and safe. At that point why send them at all instead of buying a cheap temp phone.
somenameforme 2mo ago
I think you're conflating two very different things. You're completely right that the government can make pretty much whatever they want illegal, but things are legal unless expressly made illegal. Erasing your phone wouldn't be illegal because it implies guilt, but because of obstruction/destruction laws explicitly criminalize such things. The whole case is going to come down to the nuanced and often contradictory interpretations of border law exceptions. I also don't agree that these sort of protections are for e.g. robbers, because of the criminal underground's $5 in-person data hacking tool. [1] [1] - https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
qurren 2mo ago
Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN? At the most they'd just confiscate the phone, and it'd be encrypted anyway. No actual destruction of anything. On another note, maybe GrapheneOS should add some kind of feature where the phone involuntarily destructs if a correct PIN isn't entered for 48 hours (or whatever the user sets at installation time, and changing the value should not be permitted). That way the trigger for the wipe is the confiscation, not the act of entry of a duress PIN. You could disclose the mechanism to the officials who intend to confiscate, and also say (truthfully) that you have no control over the feature.
- chii 2mo ago
  This is a form of legal evasion similar to warrant canaries imho : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary i m not sure how legal a protection it is, and whether the courts would interpret your choice of OS as complicit in evidence destruction.
- microtonal 2mo ago
  Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN? Purely technically it would also depend on the state of the phone. Phones can be read out/exploited more easily after first unlock (AFU) than before first unlock (BFU). So, a middle path would be putting the phone in BFU. Much harder to use exploits against the phone and biometric authentication doesn't work. One way of fairly reliably doing this is setting the reboot timer to 10 minutes or turning off the phone in critical situations. It's also relevant to take into account that he wasn't protecting himself by wiping the phone, but fellow activists. So, he may have taken the risk of potential legal issues by wiping the phone to project others.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- pluto_modadic 2mo ago
  there already is an app for that. https://f-droid.org/packages/net.oblivion.wipe/ https://f-droid.org/packages/net.oblivion.wipe/
razorbeamz 2mo ago
Good luck proving in a court what he was trying to do though.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Well he told them. He said something like: haha that wiped my phone, now you can't get the data
- account42 2mo ago
  Turns out that courts don't need mathematically sound proofs and if everyone in the room agrees that you deliberately wiped your phone then that's what you will be judged on.
raverbashing 2mo ago
> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic This is the thing that people should be reminded over and over here - and to be fair it tends to be more autistic than elsewhere (Regardless if you are on the defendant or the prosecution side - or might potentially be)
_3u10 2mo ago
He gave them the unlock code, now it’s unlocked.
mrkeen 2mo ago
If only they could be as non-autistic about the law consistently. From the article, it looks like warrantless search & seizure and lawyerless detainment over the suspicion of participating in plain old 1st amendment activities.
coldtea 2mo ago
In general a government can do whatever they can get away with. The rest (believing they can't do this or that, because it's in some constitutional document, or violates a basic right) is sovereign citizen kind of self-delusion.
- iamnothere 2mo ago
  If a government operates outside its remit, competing forces (opposition parties, civil society, counter-elites, foreign influences) use that as an opportunity to gain power by calling attention to the violation. “The law” may be a fuzzy illusion, but it’s delineating a real social boundary. Legal processes are a way of processing that conflict symbolically rather than jumping straight to open warfare. But you better believe that open warfare will result if those boundaries are ignored for long enough or if they are violated egregiously.
  - account42 2mo ago
    Which is the reason that governments are clamping down hard on private communication - so that they can nib the "open warfare" part in the bud before it can be organized enough to become a threat. I'm (not) looking forward to the first cyber civil war to find out how well that will work out for them.
rigrassm 2mo ago
Please elaborate on how US law isn't "autistic".
- account42 2mo ago
  He did in the second clause of that sentence.
Fraterkes 2mo ago
Maybe I should get a thicker skin, but the prevalence of “autistic” as shorthand for “moronically literal-minded” on a place as prudish as hn is a bit surprising.
mattlondon 2mo ago
Yes this is the whole $5-dollar-wrench XKCD thing. "Ahah! I've won! The data has gone!! MUWAHAHAH! Take THAT border guards".... congrats you're still going to the same prison though. If you've got something to hide (legitimately or not), don't take it across the border in the US or anywhere. Even then I am sure they'll either compel you to hand over your cloud passwords or again you end up going to the same prison for some other reason.
- Cider9986 2mo ago
  You can hide cloud passwords very easily compared to local.
randyrand 2mo ago
He didn't type the numbers. The destruction was performed by the border guards recklessly typing in commands to a phone without knowing what it would do.

halestock 2mo ago

A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.

hahahaa 2mo ago
Does anyone think law is computer code? I mean any courtroom drama (even if far fetched) shows it is not.
steve_taylor 2mo ago
It reminds me of tax law in many countries. You can follow the letter of the law, but if the vibes are off, you can still be found to be in breach of a vague catch-all provision (e.g. economic substance doctorine in the US, GAAR in Canada/UK, Part IVA in Australia, etc).
- hahahaa 2mo ago
  UK has systematic tax avoidance IIRC i.e. keep starting and closing businesses to save tax is frowned upon. Australia can treat your capital gains as income if your gains quack like trades. (Maybe now less important since the recent CGT changes).
- ls612 2mo ago
  To misquote Bismarck, only fools, drunks, and Americans actually believe the rule of law is real.
lokar 2mo ago
There is a strong bias by the courts to interpret the law in such a way that it makes sense, and achieves the goals the legislature had when enacting it.
- Barbing 2mo ago
  Just read this point in a case revolving around the Oxford comma, stated in simple enough legalese I could understand: “laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispu...
ndiddy 2mo ago
For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.
- hahahaa 2mo ago
  This sort of legal workaround can work (see Uber) though. Uber avoided medallions. I guess that proves law is not code!
  - iamnothere 2mo ago
    It depends on how much money you have to grease the wheels.
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
  They were accused of "public performance" which doesn't make sense to the spirit of the law to begin with. Avoiding technicality via technicality is fine. They should have been allowed to run their thousands of independent servers. The reason cable companies have to pay these fees in the first place is a narrow and somewhat pedantic argument that is entirely based on connecting multiple households to the same antenna. Which Aereo doesn't do, no trickery involved. If there had been a style of "cable" company that used one wire and antenna per house from the start, they could have avoided these fees too. They only didn't exist because cables and antennas are expensive. Any single person could have legally set up their own server and antenna. But Aereo building these en masse makes them a cable company instead of an antenna-building company because... vibes, basically. The best evidence that this was a failure of justice is that they pivoted to "okay, we're cable, we'll pay the fees for a mandatory license" and got rejected for not being a cable company.
mrtksn 2mo ago
Maybe this is because of the TV dramas where a genius lawyer saves their client through an obscure technicality. It looks exactly like hacking a system using a 0-day exploit.
palmotea 2mo ago
> A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law. It's worse than that: a lot of engineer types reason about almost everything as if it were code. It's a manifestation of Engineer's disease.
- snovv_crash 2mo ago
  I now see engineers treating people like AI agents. It can always get worse...
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
bubblethink 2mo ago
It's not that there's a human interpreting the law. It's that there is a politically motivated human interpreting the law, or in other words, you are sol if the state wants to get you. The engineer's arguments aren't reductionist, they are idealistic.

zug_zug 2mo ago

I think people are aware that the government can physically do a lot of stuff, e.g. shoot you in the face for no reason. And vice-versa for that matter. However there are arguments morally, and constitutionally, and logically, about what can be done.

pennomi 2mo ago
And all of those arguments are entirely academic, and subject to change depending on economic status, skin color, or nationality. Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate because the alternative is violence. (Well, law is enforced with violence too, I suppose.)
- wand3r 2mo ago
  Yes, this is something more people really need to take to heart. As Americans are seeing, a lot of rules are unenforceable and really came down to norms and pressure. I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few years and it is roughly encapsulated in this tweet I saw a while back. When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that. This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. High trust societies with less corruption and a strong justice system try to limit these circumstances.
  - mmooss 2mo ago
    > This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. You raise the standard for justice to perfection. There also has never been perfect corruption and anarchy. > Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. That's like saying night has always superceded day. Everyone recognizes that recent years have been very unusual or unique in US history. That means for the great bulk of US history, it was different. Why doesn't 99% of US history outweigh the 1% (picking numbers very loosely) in determining what is somehow inevitable to you. In fact, law is universal among human cultures. We are naturally social and live in groups with rules. Those that violate rules are generally outcasts. But the most fundamental and significant error is attributing the current situation to some unavoidable system instead of the actions of people, especially those that stand aside and allow these things to happen. Many of them stand aside because they are told - probably messaging ultimately from the lawbreakers - that they are powerless and should despair.

sfRattan 2mo ago

> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did. Love this way of putting it. Stealing for future conversations with fellow software developers.

mh- 2mo ago
I favorited the comment for the same reason. It's a perfect way of describing it.
- mikeweiss 2mo ago
  I think it's insulting
  - mh- 2mo ago
    Not sure if you mean to software developers, or to those who are autistic, but I'm both.
    - s08148692 2mo ago
      Same - also thought it was hilarious
  - smrq 2mo ago
    It's kind of funny and also kind of insulting. I'd laugh if a friend said it but said seriously by some rando on the Internet, nah, find a better way to put it.
  - tbrownaw 2mo ago
    What's the less insulting but similarly concise way to make the same substantive point?
    - Lanrei 2mo ago
      Replace autistic with literal.

daishi55 2mo ago

In this case, the government was against him due to his activism against a police training campus. Him deleting his phone was very likely a matter of safety for his fellow activists. Sad that our government does this but it’s not like this guy was a drug dealing or something.

runjake 2mo ago

I'm waiting to see whether he is convicted before I form a strong opinion around this. I'm leaning toward thinking this case will be dropped or at least severely reduced charges.

chii 2mo ago
There's a chilling effect from even just the arrest.
- hahahaa 2mo ago
  Oh this. Poor people lose their job because of an arrest. Arrest = homeless = dead sooner. Best outcome is he successfully sues for the violations.
- epolanski 2mo ago
  If you're against an academia for further police militarization you're a terrorist apparently. And people are still convinced that's the land of the free, when it's a distorted non-representative democracy on top of a police state. US is closer to South American banana republics than Iceland or Japan.
surgical_fire 2mo ago
It doesn't matter. Mamy will read this and think that crossing a border with a GrapheneOS device is a bad idea, or just drop using what is a nice security feature entirely. Just being charged is already a massive pain in the ass (both in terms of stress and costs) to an individual.
- runjake 2mo ago
  It is a massive pain in the ass, but if the case is thrown out, the gov't may be less likely to arrest someone again. Who knows, under the current regime. They seem to go after whoever they want.

godwinson__4-8 2mo ago

"U.S. law though is highly non-autistic" hilarious but also another point to emphasize is how truly depressing American courts often are. Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psychology show how much peer pressure and other factors extrinsic to the law come into play. Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz. Law is the mask of power. By all means defend and assert your rights, but understand the costs. I find people are under such illusions about how cruel the American justice system is that this leads them to make foolish decisions. Do not underestimate the adversarial nature of the justice system, nor the accompanying incentives agents of the state who are on the other side of you have to lie.

throwaforfeds1 2mo ago
> Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz. Indeed. There are certainly parallels between him and Sam Tunick. But I'm not sure the public is ready for all the parallels.
Hnrobert42 2mo ago
Is the high success rate because they are good at winning or good at picking winning cases? Does that 90% include plea bargains?
- Exoristos 2mo ago
  You're begging OP's question.
  - duxup 2mo ago
    I think it’s a valid question as far as what the nature of that success rate is.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago
    How so? OP is strongly implying that the 90% success rate for prosecutors is due to the courts being stacked against the defense. IMO that is where the logical fallacy is. Since prosecutors have wide latitude in deciding which cases to charge in the first place, it is very possible that the high success rate is due to prosecutors only charging cases where the accused actually committed the crimes being charged. Indeed, for the ~10% of cases where the accused is not found guilty, about 8% are due to the government dropping the case - only 1% are the jury acquitting the defendant outright. Thus, it would appear from that data that when the prosecution sees they are not likely to win a case, they drop it. I'm making no argument that the courts or law are "fair", I'm just making the argument that quoting the 90% number is in no way evidence that courts are inherently biased towards the prosecution.

Georgelemental 2mo ago

A duress pin is useful if the cost of the government getting mad at you because you wiped your data is less than the cost of letting the government have your data. Whether that holds depends on your situation—for example, whether your phone's data could implicate other people that you want to protect

sqemo 2mo ago
I think it's a matter of personal privacy. You shouldn't show it to other people.
ziofill 2mo ago
When talking about costs we should remember who is paying. Maybe overall the cost of the government getting that data is higher than the cost of them getting mad at you, but when a single individual is paying for all of it the equation might change.
- 8note 2mo ago
  ultimately everyone is paying the price of reduced rights and freedoms when the government starts wanting to check your phone for wrong-think and harass unofficial enemies of the state

dolphinscorpion 2mo ago

Yes, I had the duress codes but entered them by mistake. I wanted to enter the real one but

Ajedi32 2mo ago
If you can convince a jury with that story then it might work. Personally I wouldn't buy it. Would you?

randallsquared 2mo ago

> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic When the judge and officers of the court agree with me, the law is reasonable and just, but when they do not agree with me, the law is arbitrary and capricious. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Having the law be whatever it's thought to be by police, prosectors, judges, and others can lead to obvious injustices, but there's been no serious attempt to remove ambiguity in any country's legal code as far as I know.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 2mo ago
It’s impossible to remove (even just nearly) all ambiguity. People already complain that there are too many laws on the books.
- patrick451 2mo ago
  If there were fewer laws, there would be less to disambiguate.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Look at this week's codeberg drama. They wrote a simple law like "no projects that are mostly AI" and all of HN was like "how dare they be so vague? I need to know what percentage of my characters are allowed to be AI! 49.999% is good, right?"

TheDong 2mo ago

This was really well written in "What color are your bits": https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 Programmers have trouble seeing color (two identical numbers are the same bits, how can typing '1234' to unlock one phone be legal, and '1234' to unlock another phone be illegal?) Courts care about color (intent, provenance, permission), even though that color cannot be digitally represented.

abofh 2mo ago
Indeed, but should he say his real code was one digit swap off, could you prove intent? Color matters, but you can't paint with only one
- CJefferson 2mo ago
  This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone. Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.
  - sReinwald 2mo ago
    Framing this as whether he can convince you the mistype was accidental gets it backwards, and "would I believe X or would I think Y" is preponderance, not reasonable doubt - entirely different standard. Reasonable doubt doesn't ask which account you find more likely. It asks whether the innocent one is unreasonable. Take the hypothetical as posed: duress code one digit off, entered while detained after being interrogated for hours, and repeatedly pressured to unlock. The government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he knowingly triggered the wipe and did it for the purpose of impairing the seizure. Nothing about that scenario makes mistyping an unreasonable explanation unless there is more circumstantial evidence that indicates him intentionally providing the wrong PIN. Proving that to a jury looks very hard.
    - 2mo ago

duxup 2mo ago

When I had jury duty it was quite revealing as far as “this is all evidence including people’s testimony, you can believe all or some or none of a given piece of evidence based on your own judgment” goes. When we met it was interesting how our jurors decided “I don’t believe anything that guy says” and so on when it came to their motives and so on. The trial itself was very carefully choreographed, almost pre determined and static. But the decisions and jury activity was very dynamic. There was absolutely no magic legal mechanisms at that point.

Telaneo 2mo ago

Heck, it could be unconstitutional for the government to make X illegal, but if the courts say 'no actually it isn't', or it never actually gets to that point, then it doesn't really matter much, does it? The text of the law could be simple and straightforward, and a layman's reading of that text could be valid, but all the government or courts needs to do is to find some moon logic to make what they need happen, and unless enough people disagree, then that's all there is to it. The law, in many ways, for better or worse, is just a piece of paper.

camel_gopher 2mo ago

Mens rea

refurb 2mo ago

>U.S. law though is highly non-autistic LOL, that made me chuckle. People somehow think they're the first one to think of a workaround to a law, when in fact it's been happening since the first law was written down. The law adjusted and if people think they can do one thing, then claim they intended another they have a big surprise coming.

sandworm101 2mo ago

He should have backed up the phone before travelling then wiped the phone to an innocuous state before getting on the plane. Want to see a really confused border agent? Travel without a phone. Fedex your phone to your hotel/home. Read a book on the plane. The concept that someone doesn't have a phone/computer drives cops insane. One of the wikileaks crew pulled this one in NY. Several agencies were a set to grab his devices and detain him until he unlocked them ... But all he had in his carry-on was a magazine. His devices had been wiped and sent by mail. He re-imaged them only once he was home and safe. No devices to unlock, no reason to detain him.

account42 2mo ago
> He re-imaged them only once he was home and safe. At that point why send them at all instead of buying a cheap temp phone.

somenameforme 2mo ago

I think you're conflating two very different things. You're completely right that the government can make pretty much whatever they want illegal, but things are legal unless expressly made illegal. Erasing your phone wouldn't be illegal because it implies guilt, but because of obstruction/destruction laws explicitly criminalize such things. The whole case is going to come down to the nuanced and often contradictory interpretations of border law exceptions. I also don't agree that these sort of protections are for e.g. robbers, because of the criminal underground's $5 in-person data hacking tool. [1] [1] - https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/

qurren 2mo ago

Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN? At the most they'd just confiscate the phone, and it'd be encrypted anyway. No actual destruction of anything. On another note, maybe GrapheneOS should add some kind of feature where the phone involuntarily destructs if a correct PIN isn't entered for 48 hours (or whatever the user sets at installation time, and changing the value should not be permitted). That way the trigger for the wipe is the confiscation, not the act of entry of a duress PIN. You could disclose the mechanism to the officials who intend to confiscate, and also say (truthfully) that you have no control over the feature.

chii 2mo ago
This is a form of legal evasion similar to warrant canaries imho : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary i m not sure how legal a protection it is, and whether the courts would interpret your choice of OS as complicit in evidence destruction.
microtonal 2mo ago
Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN? Purely technically it would also depend on the state of the phone. Phones can be read out/exploited more easily after first unlock (AFU) than before first unlock (BFU). So, a middle path would be putting the phone in BFU. Much harder to use exploits against the phone and biometric authentication doesn't work. One way of fairly reliably doing this is setting the reboot timer to 10 minutes or turning off the phone in critical situations. It's also relevant to take into account that he wasn't protecting himself by wiping the phone, but fellow activists. So, he may have taken the risk of potential legal issues by wiping the phone to project others.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
pluto_modadic 2mo ago
there already is an app for that. https://f-droid.org/packages/net.oblivion.wipe/ https://f-droid.org/packages/net.oblivion.wipe/

razorbeamz 2mo ago

Good luck proving in a court what he was trying to do though.

inigyou 2mo ago
Well he told them. He said something like: haha that wiped my phone, now you can't get the data
account42 2mo ago
Turns out that courts don't need mathematically sound proofs and if everyone in the room agrees that you deliberately wiped your phone then that's what you will be judged on.

raverbashing 2mo ago

> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic This is the thing that people should be reminded over and over here - and to be fair it tends to be more autistic than elsewhere (Regardless if you are on the defendant or the prosecution side - or might potentially be)

_3u10 2mo ago

He gave them the unlock code, now it’s unlocked.

mrkeen 2mo ago

If only they could be as non-autistic about the law consistently. From the article, it looks like warrantless search & seizure and lawyerless detainment over the suspicion of participating in plain old 1st amendment activities.

coldtea 2mo ago

In general a government can do whatever they can get away with. The rest (believing they can't do this or that, because it's in some constitutional document, or violates a basic right) is sovereign citizen kind of self-delusion.

iamnothere 2mo ago
If a government operates outside its remit, competing forces (opposition parties, civil society, counter-elites, foreign influences) use that as an opportunity to gain power by calling attention to the violation. “The law” may be a fuzzy illusion, but it’s delineating a real social boundary. Legal processes are a way of processing that conflict symbolically rather than jumping straight to open warfare. But you better believe that open warfare will result if those boundaries are ignored for long enough or if they are violated egregiously.
- account42 2mo ago
  Which is the reason that governments are clamping down hard on private communication - so that they can nib the "open warfare" part in the bud before it can be organized enough to become a threat. I'm (not) looking forward to the first cyber civil war to find out how well that will work out for them.

rigrassm 2mo ago

Please elaborate on how US law isn't "autistic".

account42 2mo ago
He did in the second clause of that sentence.

Fraterkes 2mo ago

Maybe I should get a thicker skin, but the prevalence of “autistic” as shorthand for “moronically literal-minded” on a place as prudish as hn is a bit surprising.

mattlondon 2mo ago

Yes this is the whole $5-dollar-wrench XKCD thing. "Ahah! I've won! The data has gone!! MUWAHAHAH! Take THAT border guards".... congrats you're still going to the same prison though. If you've got something to hide (legitimately or not), don't take it across the border in the US or anywhere. Even then I am sure they'll either compel you to hand over your cloud passwords or again you end up going to the same prison for some other reason.

Cider9986 2mo ago
You can hide cloud passwords very easily compared to local.

randyrand 2mo ago

He didn't type the numbers. The destruction was performed by the border guards recklessly typing in commands to a phone without knowing what it would do.