GrapheneOS duress PIN could land a man in prison

To be fair, a duress pin is definitely a good thing to have if you’re being mugged, but using it to deliberately destroy data when it’s been seized by a lawful authority is guaranteed to land you in serious trouble pretty much anywhere. Whether the border agents were, in fact, a lawful authority, and whether they had a lawful reason to seize his phone are very different questions.

The much more sensible approach is to either have a separate phobe for travelling, that has nothing you care about on it, or wipe your phone before you travel, and spend a little time building up an innocuous history on it, without putting anything you care about on it. Anything you absolutely must have access to while you’re away can be stored, encrypted, online, and you can remember the details to retrieve it.

The much more sensible approach is …

The fact that we’re discussing ways to sneak past the fascist border guards, by getting very lawyerly with a bunch of fiddly rules they don’t actually give a hoot about, is kind of a big hint that we’ve already lost our liberties to a degree we are reluctant to acknowledge.

This guy was singled out for his political opinions. Border patrol held him as a political prisoner, and when we read the story about him, we all see only too clearly that this could be any one of us.

As far as anyone knows, the CP thing was an excuse, a lie. The authoritarians aren’t following the rules, the rules exist to serve as excuses to hurt us. There isn’t going to be some magic combination of smartphone hygiene and “I know my rights” phrases that will let us escape targeting by the most corrupt cops in the country.

That first paragraph is really powerful. Cool i parrot it around? I think that needs to become common sentiment.