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.

Maybe instead of wiping the phone and restarting the duress pin should show a pre-selected number of apps and wipe everything else.

That wouldn’t avoid the destruction of property charge, just (possibly) make it harder to notice. It sounds like it was the screen flashing and the phone restarting, which is probably necessary for a full wipe, that tipped them off.

The man was in duress and being forced to hand over his PIN while being denied access to legal counsel, that is the very reason for a duress PIN. I don’t think the charge is even going to make it to real court, his defense has a great case for it to be thrown out.

Whilst, yes, he probably did feel under duress, he had a choice to make; hand over the phone, or wipe it and face the repercussions from doing so. Bear in mind, that from the agent’s point of view, they had the lawful right to search his phone, so arguing duress will be tricky at best. In his position, I’d like to think I was comfortable handing over the phone because I’d wiped it before travelling.

Having said all that, yes, I agree that his defense has some strong arguments. However, if they decide to make an exame of him, those arguments wont do him much good.

While I am not entirely disagreeing, I have to a bit for anyone that can’t bring themselves to say it (all sides should be heard).

I may have misread but I don’t think he typed the PIN, as far as I understood they had already taken the phone and were insisting he give them the PIN without any access to a lawyer. Not only did he not wipe it, he only gave them the ‘I’m in duress’ PIN because he felt he was, if I’m on the jury it’s innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.