He was charged for destroying evidence, not refusing a search
>Amendment 5:
Destroying evidence isn't testimony. Moreover he would have been in the clear if he just kept his mouth shut.
Evidence with regard to which investigation?
They can take it for a "reasonable amount of time" (inconvenience you for a few hours and make you miss your connecting flight) while they copy an encrypted image. They then must return it to you.
To put it in protective, just opening a web browser or some other app can delete/alter more data than was deleted in this case.
Although then you get a possible delay of undefined duration, additional questioning and seizure of your device.
They can say anything they want. They hold all the power. This will never change until enough people take matters into their own hands, as the system has been compromised.
we should always be asking: is this the only way you can prove the accusation? just because it would make LEO life easier - that's not justification for violating the constitution.
an consider what this case teaches us: clean up your devices before you cross a border. how does that even help the goal of law enforcement?
In theory. In practice, this is a hopelessly outdated supposition.
But no respectable judge would ever have issued a search warrant on the basis of "we want to rifle through his messages/contacts so we can hopefully accuse him of something".
Protesters against this exact same thing were mis-prosecuted under "domestic terrorism" and "racketeering" charges before (got dismissed in 2025).
Source? Are we still talking about Samuel Tunick? The article doesn't mention it, and so far as I can tell he was only charged at the border crossing for obstruction.
Even lawyers with extremely different ideologies will give you convergent answers in a lot of cases, even when those answers conflict with an apparently obvious reading of the original text. Explaining that would require drilling down into details of thousands of court cases -- like reading a complex proof of a seemingly simple theorem.
I don't like that any more than you do. It's not mathematics, and even when given all the details, I usually find their inferences laughably bad -- even when I agree with the conclusion. It's not "logic" as I apply it as a logician, philosopher, or software developer. Lawyers (people on my side ideologically) will insist on the soundness of reasoning for decisions that they don't like but accept as valid.
So I don't find quoting the Constitution to be of any utility. None of those words what you think they mean. And fixing that requires basically throwing out the entire system of American jurisprudence. Which would be fine with me, to be honest.
And that alone is already a pretty scandalous problem. If the law is not stated in a way that ordinary people can understand, how the hell are they supposed to obey it? Those who cannot afford the highly paid law explainers are basically locked out of society.
The truth is that the constitution is interpreted by humans in a common law context, and enforced by the apparatus of state, which has the means to impose its will. Calling this doublespeak is weird.
The Constitution is written in plain English. And for the most part, Supreme Court decisions are written in plain English that any reasonably literate US citizen can understand. Yes, the law has technicalities and terms of art just like any other profession.
But one of the most damaging mentalities in modern times is the idea that the common man is incapable of understanding the law at even a basic level. This is flat-out not the case. Which leads to the follow-on problem: people who think lawyers have the ability to cast magic mumbo-jumbo spells that "get their clients off on a technicality" somehow. The best quote I ever heard about that from an attorney was "any time someone says a person 'got off on a technicality,' you can pretty much just safely replace that in your head with 'had their constitutional rights egregiously violated.'"
Yes, there are problems. Qualified immunity is a problem. Prosecutorial misconduct can be a problem. Abuse of discretion at the border is a problem. But that's different from doomerism about the entire justice system to the degree Very Online people express it.
I suspect the 5th amendment is probably more valuable to the defense here as the password is effectively testimonial and the give us your password or we'll ... is compelled speech.
Either way, it's gonna be many 10s of thousands of dollars in lawyers fees to fight this. Which sucks.
I'm curious, is there any case law from the pre digital age regarding people forced to open their briefcase and let the border guard read all their documents at a port of entry?
https://yalelawjournal.org/forum/customs-immigration-and-rig...
The only reasons allowed for border searches are ensuring that individuals are legally admitted (inapplicable here because citizens are always legally entitled to enter) and preventing contraband from entering.
A wiped phone can't contain contraband, so wiping the phone serves the same purpose as a search. It's not destroying evidence anymore than throwing away a water bottle before going through TSA is destroying evidence.
And it's impossible to ignore that context. This is plainly wrong. And people trying to justify this plainly fascist search is sickening.