What actually protects a phone at a border: encryption, BFU state, and preparation, not last-minute wiping.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/media.reclaimthenet.org\/images\/2026\/08\/kEwDHYgRCpn3.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nBy Rick Findlay<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On January 24, 2025, Samuel Tunick came off a flight from the Dominican Republic into Hartsfield-Jackson and was routed into secondary inspection. A Tactical Terrorism Response Team had circulated his name and photograph hours before the plane landed. In a windowless room, after he declined to answer questions, an officer told him that his refusal to talk was itself the reason they could go through his phone. He gave them a passcode. The court record describes what happened next. The screen went black, flashed several times, and the device appeared to restart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Late in 2025 the government indicted him under 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 2232(a)<\/a>, a statute written for people who throw a bag over a fence or flush something down a toilet. His federal public defender, Matthew Dodge, found exactly one prior prosecution under it, in a drug trafficking investigation. A judge in the Northern District of Georgia is expected to rule on the motion to suppress no earlier than the end of October 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA phone like Tunick’s already defeats the extraction tools the government brings to a border inspection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the phone is actually doing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nModern Android and iOS devices encrypt storage with keys that are stored nowhere in recoverable form. The keys that decrypt your data are derived from something you know, the PIN or password, and a secret held inside a dedicated security chip. On Pixel hardware, that chip is Google’s Titan M2. It enforces rate limiting in silicon, so an attacker cannot try ten thousand PINs a second against a copy of the storage. They have to go through the chip, and the chip counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This produces two states that forensic examiners care about. Before First Unlock, or BFU, is a phone that has been powered on but not yet unlocked by a human. The decryption keys remain underived, and memory holds none of them. After First Unlock, or AFU, is a phone someone has unlocked at least once since boot, where keys are resident in RAM and a great deal more is reachable. The gap between those two states is where most commercial extraction happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GrapheneOS, a hardened Android build that runs only on Pixels<\/a>, narrows the gap aggressively. It ships a configurable auto-reboot timer that forces the device back into BFU after a period of inactivity. A phone taken from you and left on a shelf returns itself to a harder state with no action from you. It restricts USB access, cuts what the system exposes to an attacker, hardens memory allocation, and separates user profiles so that compromising one does not hand over the others.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow well that works stopped being a matter of the project’s own marketing in October 2025. Someone using the handle rogueFed joined a private Cellebrite briefing on Microsoft Teams uninvited and screenshotted the internal Android OS Access Support Matrix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As 404 Media reported<\/a>, the slide listed stock Pixels as yielding at least some data across BFU, AFU and unlocked states. Pixels running current GrapheneOS were listed as inaccessible. An earlier leaked matrix from February 2025 told the same story. Both matrices are Cellebrite’s own accounting of what its tools can open, and both listed this combination of hardware and software as out of reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe duress password is a separate feature, added in June 2024, and it works differently from what most people assume. Entering it destroys the derivation material, the cryptographic input required to reconstruct the keys protecting user data, rather than unlocking the phone and deleting files. The encrypted bytes remain on the flash storage and become mathematically useless. The wipe covers all profiles on the device and any installed eSIMs, triggers anywhere the system asks for credentials rather than only at the lock screen, requires no reboot, and cannot be interrupted once started<\/a>. GrapheneOS has said it can do nothing to help investigators recover data afterward.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe operating system already defeated the extraction tools without anyone touching the duress PIN. The encryption is what keeps the data out of a Cellebrite report. What the duress PIN adds is permanence. It takes recovery off the table for good, for the government and for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why it should almost never be used<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/media.reclaimthenet.org\/images\/2026\/08\/iZJS1bB5HDKx.png\")
The device unlock settings page on GrapheneOS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe GrapheneOS Foundation itself<\/a>, in a post the weekend after the indictment became public, told users to think hard before triggering it. The feature exists, but people should consider how to use it in a situation where there can be physical or legal consequences for wiping the device, and the operating system does not require it to keep data from being extracted.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA duress wipe is the only part of the GrapheneOS security model that creates a new, observable event in front of a government officer. Everything else, the encryption, the auto-reboot, the profile isolation, is passive. It happens whether or not anyone is watching, and there is no act to prosecute. Reaching for the one feature that generates an act converts a defensible technical posture into an argument about intent. Tunick did it in front of an armed federal officer, in a room where he had already been told he had no right to a lawyer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The stealth argument is wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nGrapheneOS has been answering the same suggestion since the indictment, that it should make the wipe undetectable. The variant is a decoy profile that appears when a special code is entered, so the officer sees a plausible-looking phone and never knows the real one exists. The project has rejected it<\/a>, and it is right to. Its response was that the decoy concept “wouldn’t hide the presence of other profiles and would be trivially identified,” and that basic forensic software running on a laptop would spot it without needing any exploit. A decoy any examiner can name is a confession with extra steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe public record leaves one question open. GrapheneOS’s own description is that the wipe leaves the device in something resembling a factory-reset state, which does not by itself announce intent. Whether a lab can distinguish a duress wipe from an ordinary reset in every case goes undocumented on both sides. Anyone claiming certainty in either direction is going beyond what has been published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a port of entry the distinction collapses anyway. The officer typed the code. The officer watched the screen go black. Whatever a lab could or could not reconstruct from the storage six weeks later is irrelevant to a witness who was standing there. Designing for forensic deniability against an adversary who observed the event in person is solving the wrong problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GrapheneOS’s defense right now is short. The software is lawful, its behavior is documented publicly, it does exactly what the manual says, and using a feature as specified is not a crime. The project has said as much, arguing that creating and using it is constitutionally protected and that laws requiring it to weaken security would be unconstitutional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you build in a wipe whose purpose is to deceive an officer about the state of a device, prosecutors are handed the intent element they currently have to argue for. A feature designed to lie makes every user of that feature a liar in the government’s opening statement. Asking a security project to ship deniability is asking it to trade a defensible engineering stance for a fragile theatrical one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the law actually permits<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nCourts have long held that searches at the international border are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant, and that routine ones require no individualized suspicion at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That rule was built for suitcases. The Supreme Court has never applied it to a phone, and it declined to treat phones as ordinary containers in Riley v. California in 2014, holding that device searches bear little resemblance to searches of bags.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The circuits have spent a decade splitting the difference. The Fourth Circuit held in Kolsuz in 2018 that forensic border searches of phones are non-routine and need some individualized suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aigbekaen in 2019 added that a forensic search supporting a purely domestic investigation needs a warrant. Then on July 13, 2026, in United States v. Belmonte Cardozo<\/a>, the same court held that a manual search, an officer scrolling with their thumbs, is routine and needs neither a warrant nor suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe facts were about as unfavorable to the privacy side as they get. An officer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, opened the hidden photo gallery on a traveler’s iPhone at Dulles and found child sexual abuse material in roughly two minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That ruling now controls in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas, and it aligns the Fourth Circuit with the First, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief arguing<\/a> that a search reaching the same data should face the same standard whether performed by thumb or by software. The rule the court adopted turns on the officer’s choice of method rather than on what the officer sees. CBP ran 55,318 device searches in fiscal year 2025, up 32 percent since 2023<\/a>, and 50,922 of those were basic manual searches. The July ruling covers about 92 percent of what the agency actually does.<\/p>\n\n\n\nJudge Nina Morrison of the Eastern District of New York went the other way. She held in United States v. Sultanov in 2024 that a cellphone search at the border is non-routine and requires a warrant and probable cause<\/a>, drawing directly on Riley. She saw no reason the Supreme Court’s reasoning should apply with less force at the border than it does to a search incident to arrest. Her ruling binds one district. The Second Circuit has yet to resolve the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCBP also polices itself. Directive 3340-049B<\/a>, in force since January 2026, replaced the 2018 version. Basic searches may be conducted with or without suspicion. Advanced searches, where equipment is connected to copy and analyze the contents, require supervisory approval and reasonable suspicion of a violation of the laws CBP enforces, or a national security concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe directive widened the list of searchable hardware to include smartwatches, SIM cards, flash drives, drones, GPS units and vehicle infotainment systems. Devices may be detained, normally for no more than five calendar days, with extensions available. The directive puts cloud-only data off limits, and officers may ask travelers to disable connectivity first. Attorney-client material, journalistic work product and medical records trigger a segregation protocol involving agency counsel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the Fifth Amendment, the split is stronger still. Telling an officer your passcode is testimonial because it reveals the contents of your mind. Being made to press a thumb to a sensor is not, at least in the Ninth Circuit. It held in United States v. Payne in 2024 that compelled biometric unlocking requires no cognitive exertion and is closer to a blood draw<\/a>. United States v. Brown reached the opposite conclusion in the D.C. Circuit in January 2025. Until the Supreme Court resolves it, a passcode gives a traveler a constitutional argument and a fingerprint gives them a shrug.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere is no right to counsel during a border inspection, which is why Tunick’s repeated requests for a lawyer went nowhere. His attorneys are arguing that the duress password was obtained in violation of his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights and that everything downstream is fruit of an unlawful interrogation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Section 2232(a) criminalizes destroying property “for the purpose of preventing or impairing the Government’s lawful authority” to take it into custody. Lawful is the load-bearing word. If the detention and attempted seizure were unconstitutional, the authority was not lawful, and the prosecution’s own charging theory starts to come apart. Tunick’s lawyers wrote that officers were not permitted to disregard all constitutional protections merely because he was at the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CBP told Tunick they were looking for child abuse material. The Ninth Circuit held in United States v. Cano in 2019 that such images are among the narrow categories where digital data itself counts as contraband for border search purposes. Saying the words invokes the doctrine, whether it’s true or not. FBI emails obtained by Tunick’s defense<\/a> show the government was investigating him over the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, and the two-page indictment makes no mention of child exploitation material. Dodge has said the agents could have sought a warrant and did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAcross the Atlantic, the arithmetic inverts<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe British rules are worse. Under Schedule 7<\/a> of the Terrorism Act 2000, officers at ports may stop, question and examine travelers with no suspicion at all, download the contents of devices, and demand passwords. Refusal is an offense in itself. Where police serve a notice under Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, failing to hand over the keys is prosecutable under Section 53<\/a>. The maximum is two years, rising to five in national security cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn the United States, silence is a right you can exercise at a cost. In the United Kingdom, silence is the offense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How a British court would treat a duress wipe has never been tested. Section 53 provides a defense for a person who no longer holds the keys. Keys destroyed months before any notice are a different thing from keys destroyed after, but nobody should volunteer to be the test case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Who this actually lands on<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe chilling effect lands hardest on people whose devices carry other people’s secrets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A reporter’s phone holds source contact details, unpublished material, and the identities of people who spoke on condition of anonymity. Morrison leaned heavily on an amicus brief from the Knight First Amendment Institute<\/a> and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press making that argument. The Reporters Committee’s Grayson Clary said journalists crossing a border should not have to fear that the government can sift through confidential source communications without court approval. A lawyer’s laptop holds privileged client material that Rule 1.6(c) of the American Bar Association’s model rules obliges them to make reasonable efforts to protect. The ABA has been pressing the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, on this since 2019 without getting a rule that prevents a search. A clinician’s phone holds patient information, and for a person fleeing an abusive partner the device may be the only record of what happened to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFor non-citizens, the calculus is even harsher. A US citizen who refuses to hand over a passcode may lose the device for days but cannot be refused entry. A visa holder or visitor who refuses can be turned away. The right to say no is a citizen’s privilege. The advice to travel with an empty phone carries its own risk for them, since an unusually empty device can itself attract attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nBy Rick Findlay<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On January 24, 2025, Samuel Tunick came off a flight from the Dominican Republic into Hartsfield-Jackson and was routed into secondary inspection. A Tactical Terrorism Response Team had circulated his name and photograph hours before the plane landed. In a windowless room, after he declined to answer questions, an officer told him that his refusal to talk was itself the reason they could go through his phone. He gave them a passcode. The court record describes what happened next. The screen went black, flashed several times, and the device appeared to restart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Late in 2025 the government indicted him under 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 2232(a)<\/a>, a statute written for people who throw a bag over a fence or flush something down a toilet. His federal public defender, Matthew Dodge, found exactly one prior prosecution under it, in a drug trafficking investigation. A judge in the Northern District of Georgia is expected to rule on the motion to suppress no earlier than the end of October 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A phone like Tunick’s already defeats the extraction tools the government brings to a border inspection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the phone is actually doing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Modern Android and iOS devices encrypt storage with keys that are stored nowhere in recoverable form. The keys that decrypt your data are derived from something you know, the PIN or password, and a secret held inside a dedicated security chip. On Pixel hardware, that chip is Google’s Titan M2. It enforces rate limiting in silicon, so an attacker cannot try ten thousand PINs a second against a copy of the storage. They have to go through the chip, and the chip counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This produces two states that forensic examiners care about. Before First Unlock, or BFU, is a phone that has been powered on but not yet unlocked by a human. The decryption keys remain underived, and memory holds none of them. After First Unlock, or AFU, is a phone someone has unlocked at least once since boot, where keys are resident in RAM and a great deal more is reachable. The gap between those two states is where most commercial extraction happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GrapheneOS, a hardened Android build that runs only on Pixels<\/a>, narrows the gap aggressively. It ships a configurable auto-reboot timer that forces the device back into BFU after a period of inactivity. A phone taken from you and left on a shelf returns itself to a harder state with no action from you. It restricts USB access, cuts what the system exposes to an attacker, hardens memory allocation, and separates user profiles so that compromising one does not hand over the others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How well that works stopped being a matter of the project’s own marketing in October 2025. Someone using the handle rogueFed joined a private Cellebrite briefing on Microsoft Teams uninvited and screenshotted the internal Android OS Access Support Matrix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As 404 Media reported<\/a>, the slide listed stock Pixels as yielding at least some data across BFU, AFU and unlocked states. Pixels running current GrapheneOS were listed as inaccessible. An earlier leaked matrix from February 2025 told the same story. Both matrices are Cellebrite’s own accounting of what its tools can open, and both listed this combination of hardware and software as out of reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The duress password is a separate feature, added in June 2024, and it works differently from what most people assume. Entering it destroys the derivation material, the cryptographic input required to reconstruct the keys protecting user data, rather than unlocking the phone and deleting files. The encrypted bytes remain on the flash storage and become mathematically useless. The wipe covers all profiles on the device and any installed eSIMs, triggers anywhere the system asks for credentials rather than only at the lock screen, requires no reboot, and cannot be interrupted once started<\/a>. GrapheneOS has said it can do nothing to help investigators recover data afterward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The operating system already defeated the extraction tools without anyone touching the duress PIN. The encryption is what keeps the data out of a Cellebrite report. What the duress PIN adds is permanence. It takes recovery off the table for good, for the government and for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why it should almost never be used<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The GrapheneOS Foundation itself<\/a>, in a post the weekend after the indictment became public, told users to think hard before triggering it. The feature exists, but people should consider how to use it in a situation where there can be physical or legal consequences for wiping the device, and the operating system does not require it to keep data from being extracted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A duress wipe is the only part of the GrapheneOS security model that creates a new, observable event in front of a government officer. Everything else, the encryption, the auto-reboot, the profile isolation, is passive. It happens whether or not anyone is watching, and there is no act to prosecute. Reaching for the one feature that generates an act converts a defensible technical posture into an argument about intent. Tunick did it in front of an armed federal officer, in a room where he had already been told he had no right to a lawyer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The stealth argument is wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n GrapheneOS has been answering the same suggestion since the indictment, that it should make the wipe undetectable. The variant is a decoy profile that appears when a special code is entered, so the officer sees a plausible-looking phone and never knows the real one exists. The project has rejected it<\/a>, and it is right to. Its response was that the decoy concept “wouldn’t hide the presence of other profiles and would be trivially identified,” and that basic forensic software running on a laptop would spot it without needing any exploit. A decoy any examiner can name is a confession with extra steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The public record leaves one question open. GrapheneOS’s own description is that the wipe leaves the device in something resembling a factory-reset state, which does not by itself announce intent. Whether a lab can distinguish a duress wipe from an ordinary reset in every case goes undocumented on both sides. Anyone claiming certainty in either direction is going beyond what has been published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At a port of entry the distinction collapses anyway. The officer typed the code. The officer watched the screen go black. Whatever a lab could or could not reconstruct from the storage six weeks later is irrelevant to a witness who was standing there. Designing for forensic deniability against an adversary who observed the event in person is solving the wrong problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GrapheneOS’s defense right now is short. The software is lawful, its behavior is documented publicly, it does exactly what the manual says, and using a feature as specified is not a crime. The project has said as much, arguing that creating and using it is constitutionally protected and that laws requiring it to weaken security would be unconstitutional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you build in a wipe whose purpose is to deceive an officer about the state of a device, prosecutors are handed the intent element they currently have to argue for. A feature designed to lie makes every user of that feature a liar in the government’s opening statement. Asking a security project to ship deniability is asking it to trade a defensible engineering stance for a fragile theatrical one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the law actually permits<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Courts have long held that searches at the international border are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant, and that routine ones require no individualized suspicion at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That rule was built for suitcases. The Supreme Court has never applied it to a phone, and it declined to treat phones as ordinary containers in Riley v. California in 2014, holding that device searches bear little resemblance to searches of bags.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The circuits have spent a decade splitting the difference. The Fourth Circuit held in Kolsuz in 2018 that forensic border searches of phones are non-routine and need some individualized suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aigbekaen in 2019 added that a forensic search supporting a purely domestic investigation needs a warrant. Then on July 13, 2026, in United States v. Belmonte Cardozo<\/a>, the same court held that a manual search, an officer scrolling with their thumbs, is routine and needs neither a warrant nor suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The facts were about as unfavorable to the privacy side as they get. An officer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, opened the hidden photo gallery on a traveler’s iPhone at Dulles and found child sexual abuse material in roughly two minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That ruling now controls in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas, and it aligns the Fourth Circuit with the First, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief arguing<\/a> that a search reaching the same data should face the same standard whether performed by thumb or by software. The rule the court adopted turns on the officer’s choice of method rather than on what the officer sees. CBP ran 55,318 device searches in fiscal year 2025, up 32 percent since 2023<\/a>, and 50,922 of those were basic manual searches. The July ruling covers about 92 percent of what the agency actually does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Judge Nina Morrison of the Eastern District of New York went the other way. She held in United States v. Sultanov in 2024 that a cellphone search at the border is non-routine and requires a warrant and probable cause<\/a>, drawing directly on Riley. She saw no reason the Supreme Court’s reasoning should apply with less force at the border than it does to a search incident to arrest. Her ruling binds one district. The Second Circuit has yet to resolve the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CBP also polices itself. Directive 3340-049B<\/a>, in force since January 2026, replaced the 2018 version. Basic searches may be conducted with or without suspicion. Advanced searches, where equipment is connected to copy and analyze the contents, require supervisory approval and reasonable suspicion of a violation of the laws CBP enforces, or a national security concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The directive widened the list of searchable hardware to include smartwatches, SIM cards, flash drives, drones, GPS units and vehicle infotainment systems. Devices may be detained, normally for no more than five calendar days, with extensions available. The directive puts cloud-only data off limits, and officers may ask travelers to disable connectivity first. Attorney-client material, journalistic work product and medical records trigger a segregation protocol involving agency counsel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the Fifth Amendment, the split is stronger still. Telling an officer your passcode is testimonial because it reveals the contents of your mind. Being made to press a thumb to a sensor is not, at least in the Ninth Circuit. It held in United States v. Payne in 2024 that compelled biometric unlocking requires no cognitive exertion and is closer to a blood draw<\/a>. United States v. Brown reached the opposite conclusion in the D.C. Circuit in January 2025. Until the Supreme Court resolves it, a passcode gives a traveler a constitutional argument and a fingerprint gives them a shrug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no right to counsel during a border inspection, which is why Tunick’s repeated requests for a lawyer went nowhere. His attorneys are arguing that the duress password was obtained in violation of his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights and that everything downstream is fruit of an unlawful interrogation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Section 2232(a) criminalizes destroying property “for the purpose of preventing or impairing the Government’s lawful authority” to take it into custody. Lawful is the load-bearing word. If the detention and attempted seizure were unconstitutional, the authority was not lawful, and the prosecution’s own charging theory starts to come apart. Tunick’s lawyers wrote that officers were not permitted to disregard all constitutional protections merely because he was at the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CBP told Tunick they were looking for child abuse material. The Ninth Circuit held in United States v. Cano in 2019 that such images are among the narrow categories where digital data itself counts as contraband for border search purposes. Saying the words invokes the doctrine, whether it’s true or not. FBI emails obtained by Tunick’s defense<\/a> show the government was investigating him over the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, and the two-page indictment makes no mention of child exploitation material. Dodge has said the agents could have sought a warrant and did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across the Atlantic, the arithmetic inverts<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The British rules are worse. Under Schedule 7<\/a> of the Terrorism Act 2000, officers at ports may stop, question and examine travelers with no suspicion at all, download the contents of devices, and demand passwords. Refusal is an offense in itself. Where police serve a notice under Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, failing to hand over the keys is prosecutable under Section 53<\/a>. The maximum is two years, rising to five in national security cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the United States, silence is a right you can exercise at a cost. In the United Kingdom, silence is the offense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How a British court would treat a duress wipe has never been tested. Section 53 provides a defense for a person who no longer holds the keys. Keys destroyed months before any notice are a different thing from keys destroyed after, but nobody should volunteer to be the test case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who this actually lands on<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The chilling effect lands hardest on people whose devices carry other people’s secrets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A reporter’s phone holds source contact details, unpublished material, and the identities of people who spoke on condition of anonymity. Morrison leaned heavily on an amicus brief from the Knight First Amendment Institute<\/a> and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press making that argument. The Reporters Committee’s Grayson Clary said journalists crossing a border should not have to fear that the government can sift through confidential source communications without court approval. A lawyer’s laptop holds privileged client material that Rule 1.6(c) of the American Bar Association’s model rules obliges them to make reasonable efforts to protect. The ABA has been pressing the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, on this since 2019 without getting a rule that prevents a search. A clinician’s phone holds patient information, and for a person fleeing an abusive partner the device may be the only record of what happened to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For non-citizens, the calculus is even harsher. A US citizen who refuses to hand over a passcode may lose the device for days but cannot be refused entry. A visa holder or visitor who refuses can be turned away. The right to say no is a citizen’s privilege. The advice to travel with an empty phone carries its own risk for them, since an unusually empty device can itself attract attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n