When a Department of Homeland Security official sent out an alert to stop Samuel Tunick, a Stop Cop City activist, at an airport in January 2025, they said the reason was because he was suspected of “terrorist activities,” according to new filed court records which include a screenshot of the alert and photos of Tunick’s interrogation.
Tunick ultimately provided Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials with a code that, when entered, wiped his security- and privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone. Tunick is now being criminally charged for that alleged act, in one of the most high profile technology civil rights cases in recent memory.
The court records also showed that CBP officials lied to Tunick during his interrogation. Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism — although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such — they said they needed his phone to look for “kiddie porn.”
“Good afternoon,” an email sent from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) official, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to CBP and other officials reads. “The following subject is scheduled to arrive in ATL [Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport] today via DL 1778 @ 1930 Hours. TUNICK is under investigation by HSI/JTTF for suspected terrorist activities.” The email includes a photo of Tunick, and asks the officials to direct him to secondary inspection, retain all of his electronics, and collect their passcodes.
As 404 Media first revealed in December, Tunick was charged because he allegedly “did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control.” Matthew Dodge, one of Tunick’s lawyers, previously told 404 Media he only found one other case using the same obscure law, a drug trafficking case. “This is extraordinarily rare,” Dodge said.
Tunick was part of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which broadly protested the building of a large police training center, and which authorities investigated for arson, vandalism, and doxing. Tunick is not suspected of any crime beyond the alleged wiping of the phone, and has previously put his current prosecution in the context of the wide spanning cases against other Stop Cop City protesters.
The newly filed court record, in which Tunick’s lawyers argue that evidence should be thrown out, include new photos and descriptions of the airport encounter. The CBP officials asked Tunick if they were going to find “kiddie porn” on his phone, which Tunick immediately denied. “As the evidentiary hearing made clear, these unfounded accusations were nothing more than pretext for a fishing expedition into the depths of Mr. Tunick’s devices,” the lawyers wrote. They added, “Officer Findley acknowledged that officers had no reason whatsoever to believe Mr. Tunick possessed child pornography,” referring to one of the officials.
Tunick faces a maximum of five years in federal prison for allegedly wiping the phone.
“I hope people understand that the charges against me are meant to intimidate people against protecting their data and their privacy, and the government hopes to set a precedent that no one has the right to privacy,” Tunick previously told 404 Media.
That’s what they said happened. We have no idea if it actually happened, and based on the report here, there’s no reason we (or a jury) should believe what they say.
Do they have video? Not that we’ve seen, from what I’ve read, but maybe it exists.
Won’t work.
They’ll call in experts from the FBI, forensics firms, etc. Show the court other graphene OS models, show what happens when the duress code is entered and ask the agents whether it matched what happened. Demand his lawyers provide an alternative explanation (there are no other plausible ones). Search github and try to find similar reports of the Graphene phones “just doing that” as in wiping themselves or displaying a screen like that. There won’t be any. Reasonable conclusion that’s good enough for a conviction will be that he gave them the duress code.
He’ll either go down or walk on other factors such as the legality of the search, whether the fact he didn’t personally enter it counts (I really doubt that holds water, it’s like encouraging cops to activate a booby trap that burns down your house, the courts take a dim view of it and it’s still destruction of evidence), or some other vague technicality.
Also cops are allowed to lie to you and do it regularly as a matter of practice so the police lying to him about what the search was for is not illegal. It was a tactical, calculated lie designed to outrage the subject and get him to cooperate to prove he wasn’t a pedophile.
And the word of authorities is considered to have more weight than the word of your average person so their word it happened like this vs his that it didn’t and no other plausible explanations with evidence for his version of events and they’ll find against him.
The best thing to do is not cross international borders with sensitive info on your device. The second best thing failing that is to use a securely encrypted device like Graphene that they can’t crack and while passing through customs to put it in before first unlock mode such as restarting it.
What Graphene should have is a setting that wipes the phone automatically after so much time without an unlock. They’d have seized his phone, wouldn’t be able to crack it. Would set it aside hoping for a future vulnerability to be discovered by those zionist fascists they employ and the phone while in storage and through no direct action of his would wipe itself before they could deploy such a future vulnerability 6-12+ months down the line. Now maybe they already have a way to affect the clock on the device to prevent such a thing but it’s the only alternative I can think of to hoping the encryption stands up and there are no vulnerabilities found for years or ever.
This sounds overly optimistic bordering on delusional. There are countless examples of courts siding with authorities based on nothing but their say so and this case is a perfect candidate to ‘make an example’ out of someone uncooperative with said authorities. It’s easy to discount the stress of having a potential 5 year term hanging over you when you’re not on the receiving end of it.
Unless you’re deliberately looking to fight the fight (unlike the majority of people who find themselves in this situation), the plausible deniability provided by a more discrete wipe would keep both your data and you personally safe.
Remember folks, until the law applies equally to the owning class, its only there to keep you in line, and they will be willing to overlook anything necessary to keep you in that line.
This case may go far up the court system and I think the eventual precedent will strongly inform what we do in the future