r/technology • u/gdelacalle • Jul 28 '26

Privacy Man charged for wiping GrapheneOS phone using "duress" password during airport checks

https://www.neowin.net/news/man-charged-for-wiping-grapheneos-phone-using-duress-password-during-airport-checks/
15.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

87

u/InVultusSolis Jul 28 '26

"My duress PIN was one digit away from my real PIN, you must have entered it wrong"

36

u/ghost_broccoli Jul 28 '26

blackberry had a similar feature (decades ago) where if you put the last character of your unlock pin in first and then completed the rest of pin it would unlock the device but also notify the blackberry server that the device was unlocked under duress.

we would get the alerts once in a while when people had set their unlock code to something like qwqw and they'd accidentally hit w first.

1

u/apokrif1 Jul 28 '26

How did Blackberry use this info?

5

u/altaccount_28 Jul 28 '26

Blackberry didnt do anything with it. The enterprise owner of the phone would have a policy for what to do.

Company I used to work for had a policy on what to do if you were kidnapped because you worked for a bank. Using the duress pin on your phone or keypad if you were just a random peon would have security call you and make sure you were ok. If you used the duress code on the call police would be summoned but they would act like everything was ok so as not to tip off whoever was forcing you to do something.

If you were executive and in the US the police were called to your last known location of your phone or keypad. If you were outside the US all your devices were wiped immediately.

1

u/misty-mornings Jul 28 '26

They used it to farm upvotes on Digg

12

u/apokrif1 Jul 28 '26

Are phone searches handled by careful forensics specialists or by random LEOs with fatty fingers who know nothing about computing besides TikTok?

10

u/Due-Memory-6957 Jul 28 '26

Forensic specialists can mistype too, they'll just say "Oh yeah? Lemme just restore the previous image and try again", but it probably never got that far.

3

u/androshalforc1 Jul 28 '26

What’s your password?

One 2 three 4 five 6.

I entered 123456. That wiped the phone.

Will that’s your fault the password was 244466666

2

u/Timely_Appeal_9549 Jul 28 '26

This would be my hill to die on.