Comment by laughing_man
3 hours ago
I wouldn't assume that to be the case. It's illegal under federal law to destroy evidence of a crime. Just what the government needs to do to show that you've destroyed evidence of a crime and not just the sexting you did with your girlfriend is a pretty murky area of law, from what I can tell.
I would not present a phone to customs that had clearly just been wiped.
You're speaking nonsense since there was no charge or warrant against him. There was no crime that was committed. People are free to use their phone for f sake. People who reason as poorly as you will lead to all remaining rights being lost.
The way he wiped it is legal for the same reason. It was an illegal search and he was under no obligation to preserve the data on his phone.
It's legal to refuse to provide a PIN/password in the US. He's a US citizen so they couldn't refuse him entry. If he wasn't then the result would be getting deported.
It likely would have been a much better decision to refuse to provide the PIN/password and rely on the encryption and device security instead. He could have done a reboot or shutdown in advance but even without that it would have done it automatically via the locked device auto-reboot timer. The secure element only allows 20 attempts for key derivation with rapidly growing delays between those. If he had a strong passphrase then even a secure element exploit wouldn't obtain the data protected by it.
Ah, I see where you've gone wrong. You're expecting to apply common sense and reason to the law.
That kind of thinking has landed a whole lot of people in prison.