GrapheneOS Wipe at Airport Leads to Federal Charge in Atlanta
July 28th, 2026Via: Reclaim the Net:
The Justice Department is asking a federal court in Atlanta to treat a man’s erasure of his own phone as destruction of property, in the first known US prosecution built on a phone’s duress password.
Samuel Tunick faces one count under Title 18, Section 2232(a), a statute covering the destruction of property to stop the government from taking it. Prosecutors say he handed Customs and Border Protection officers a passcode that deleted the contents of his Google Pixel instead of unlocking it. His lawyers appeared before the court for the first time on Monday, arguing that officers ran a custodial interrogation without Miranda warnings, denied him a lawyer, and searched him unlawfully. They want everything obtained from the encounter suppressed.
Shouldn’t that be ‘destruction of *private* property’?
“…nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”