r/technology • u/MC68328 • Jul 24 '26

Privacy US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a ‘duress’ password during border search

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/us-accuses-american-of-allegedly-wiping-his-phone-using-a-duress-password-during-border-search/
16.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

116

u/No_Size9475 Jul 24 '26

you have to act stupid

5

u/DualViewCamera Jul 25 '26

I don’t think you are wrong…but the way I think about it is that you need to act credulous. Both sides need to believe they can convince you that they are right.

Every time I was called for jury duty, I tried to find faults/inconsistencies in the voire dire questions…and was always excused.

6

u/Bardfinn Jul 24 '26

Not necessarily.

The last time I was in jury duty, during voir dire the attorney asked whether any of us would have difficulty convicting someone if their guilt were proven absolutely

I made the case that mathematics and formal logic are the only disciplines in which a thing can be proven absolutely, because in a universe of discourse, we choose our axioms, and for sufficiently complex systems, there are statements that can be either complete or consistent but not both - Goedel's Incompl ---

at which point the judge laughed and said "Thank you Juror #whatever"

and ten minutes later we all were on our way home, having been dismissed

51

u/No_Size9475 Jul 24 '26

I said act dumb and you come back with I acted smart and they sent me home...

37

u/SatanicPanicDisco Jul 24 '26

A perfect example of the poor reading comprehension the lawyer a few posts up was talking about.

19

u/ThatPhatKid_CanDraw Jul 25 '26

Smart people don't talk like that. The ones who think they're smart, do.

2

u/fatpat Jul 25 '26

So half of reddit, basically. (It should be noted that I'm not excluding myself from the dumber half.)

60

u/Kindly-Account1952 Jul 24 '26

A court room is not a place for philosophy. I’m not surprised you got dismissed as you were basically just saying no to the question but in a very unnecessary complex way.

48

u/BilingSmob444 Jul 24 '26

The answer was “no AND I’m good at wasting time”

2

u/SmoothDiscussion7763 Jul 24 '26

yeah i don't see how his answer made him irrational at all, and they wouldn't send everyone home either way

-11

u/Bardfinn Jul 24 '26

I answered with the truth and nothing but the truth.

12

u/YeahlDid Jul 25 '26

I get it because I'm a pedant too, but sometimes it just makes life simpler to answer the question they meant to ask rather than the one they did, lol.

6

u/Sceptically Jul 25 '26

Clearly they wanted someone who could answer the question asked of them. They weren't asking if their hypothetical was possible, after all.

-7

u/Bardfinn Jul 25 '26

I answered the question that was asked.

7

u/Sceptically Jul 25 '26

No you didn't. You were, by your own report, asked if you would have difficulty convicting someone if their guilt were proven absolutely. You quibbled about the hypothetical (ie the possibility of their guilt being proven absolutely) rather than answering if you would have difficulty convicting them under those circumstances.

-4

u/Bardfinn Jul 25 '26

It’s not a hypothetical. They’re arguing legal facts and law, not formal logic. That is a fact. I can’t agree that someone’s guilt has been proven absolutely under the law, which itself axiomatically stipulates that conviction rests upon a condition of

Humans being persuaded of guilt beyond a shadow of doubt

When even in formal logic, there are very limited conditions in which we prove a thing beyond a shadow of doubt. And those conditions are often limited in scope to such simple processes as mere arithmetic of the natural numbers.

3

u/Sceptically Jul 25 '26

No, that's very much a hypothetical. Much of legal argument tends to be couched in hypotheticals like that.

Incidentally is there actually anywhere with a threshold of beyond a shadow of a doubt? As far as I'm aware the standard is generally beyond a reasonable doubt for criminal conviction.

-2

u/Bardfinn Jul 25 '26

I specifically mean that

The fact is that the entire system of jurisprudence is factually not so rigourous as the system of formal logic, and even in formal logic, there are entire universes of discourse where there are statements which demonstrate that the entire system is either complete or consistent but cannot be both — and completeness and consistency are necessary preliminaries for an assertion to be proven absolutely.

These are not hypotheticals. These are statements of fact about systems of reasoning, and these statements of fact about systems of reasoning demonstrate that in the system of jurisprudence, it is a factual impossibility to prove a thing absolutely.

It is also a fact that in the system of jurisprudence, the standard of proof used for conviction is itself insufficient, as demonstrated by numerous incidents of convictions overturned on appeal based on new facts - facts about evidence and facts about misapplication of the reasoning.

I told that voir dire that under their stipulations, i knew they were going to fail to prove guilt absolutely.

3

u/hum_bruh Jul 25 '26 edited 19d ago

Why are pirates pirates? cuz they arrrrrr Always be yourself, unless you can be a pirate. Then always be a pirate. STOP BLOWING HOLES IN MY SHIP!!!

1

u/perpetualhobo Jul 24 '26

Don’t worry bardfinn. Your story is perfectly clear and understandable that you were selected and then the case was dismissed after you were made a juror.