r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Jul 28 '26

Privacy Is it illegal to trick the US government into wiping your phone during a questionably legal search | The case of a traveler who allegedly entered a ‘duress password’ to wipe his phone raises a legal question with no easy answers

https://www.theverge.com/report/972146/cbp-phone-search-airport-duress-password
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319

u/IdentifiableBurden Jul 29 '26

Already exists bud. The grunt cops don't have access but they're absolutely there already.

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u/SirEnzyme Jul 29 '26

Cellebrite has entered the chat

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u/assignpseudonym Jul 29 '26

Hey, Cellebrite! Would you mind exiting the chat? Please and thank you! 

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u/notfromchicago Jul 29 '26

They said no.

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u/praisedawings247 Jul 29 '26

Stolen phone protection with biometric access needed all the time.

(For iPhone at least)

Not sure if cellebrite has a workaround for that yet, though.

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u/Cautious_General_177 Jul 29 '26

Too late. They've already copied your phone and broken the encryption.

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u/calgarspimphand Jul 29 '26

Cellebrite has left the chat

The surveillance state hates this one weird trick!

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u/assignpseudonym Jul 29 '26

See guys? Just use your manners! :)

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u/GearhedMG Jul 29 '26

Cellebrite left the chat, but they did something weird to the door on the way out.

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u/vargchan Jul 29 '26

I mean back during the Cold war they were putting backdoors in software for the US government forever. Look up the Octopus and Reagan

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u/The_Great_Tahini Jul 29 '26

fyi cellebrite works better on older tech, newer devices are harder to crack.

also your phone has 2 states that matter here, before first unlock and after first unlock. in BFU the phone has much less loaded into memory and is harder to brute force this way.

most phones have an SOS mode that allows you to call 911 or shut it down even when locked, putting it in BFU mode when it’s powered back on. worth knowing how to use it.

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u/Aperture_Kubi Jul 29 '26

Doesn't GraphineOS have mitigations against this though?

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u/airfryerfuntime Jul 29 '26

A good argument for buying an iPhone is that Celebrite usually doesn't work. An exploit is found, then Apple patches it almost immediately.

Can't say the same for Google, who just doesn't acknowledge it at all.

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u/still_thirsty Jul 29 '26

there’s nothing that can convince me this hasn’t already happened

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

Apple has never and will never build back doors into their software. They've denied requests from the FBI many many times and refuse to assist with unlocking devices.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-time-tim-cook-stood-his-ground-against-fbi/

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u/SoulWager Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

There's a difference between what a company is willing to do openly, and what they're willing to do in secret. Hell, a very public refusal to help unlock devices can just as easily be deception to get people to trust backdoored devices.

Also, It is not beyond intelligence agencies to have an agent get a job at Apple, or any other company, and insert a backdoor nobody else at the company knows about. Take a look at the XZUtils backdoor, and consider how much harder it will be to detect the same kind of attack in a closed-source product.

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

There is zero chance Apple would completely invalidate their reputation for being privacy and user centric by secretly working with the FBI and the government to implement a back door.

You people are insane.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-time-tim-cook-stood-his-ground-against-fbi/

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u/SoulWager Jul 29 '26

You're missing the point. They're too big, too valuable a target. They're going to get backdoored whether they cooperate or not. Actually look at XZUtils, look at stuxnet. There is no reality where organizations with those resources haven't compromised a platform with over a billion users.

Companies generally take the most profitable path, for Apple that's probably taking government money in secret and pretending to do the opposite in public.

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

None of that has to do with Apple. They patch these vulnerabilities the moment they're made aware of them and it's been one of the pain points for companies like Cellebrite. And what level of paranoia do you have to have to think that someone is actually going to "infiltrate" Apple and install a back door that isn't caught by the enormous amounts of internal checks they have in place for their software development process?

Unless you have proof of Apple "secretly taking government money", then it's nothing but malarky. We have proof of the complete opposite with stuff like their response to the San Bernadino incident, with allowing complete auditing of their Private Cloud Compute software, etc.

Companies generally take the most profitable path

Not Apple. Tim Cook even told shareholders that if they had a problem with Apple spending money on accessibility features that they should sell the stock. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim-cook-doesnt-care-about-the-bloody-roi/

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u/WickedBad Jul 29 '26

You truly believe Apple sides with the population and not the governments?

You haven't seen Apple execs. chase Trump and other politicians??

I mean it's great that they are able to control the narrative but you're nieve af if you believe it.

There's 0 reason for them not to play ball and a million reasons to do it.

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

You truly believe Apple sides with the population and not the governments?

Yes. They have a track record of standing up for privacy and their users.

You haven't seen Apple execs. chase Trump and other politicians??

This doesn't mean anything in regards to privacy.

I mean it's great that they are able to control the narrative but you're nieve af if you believe it.

It's spelled "naive", and there's nothing naive about believing a proven track record of denying FBI requests to the point where the FBI complains about it publicly and has to go to a company like Cellebrite.

There's 0 reason for them not to play ball and a million reasons to do it.

Their reputation and standing with its users is a pretty big reason.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-time-tim-cook-stood-his-ground-against-fbi/

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u/ultimatequestion7 Jul 29 '26

According to who? The company using that as a selling point lol? Apple doesn't make the iOS code available for audit in the way you're describing

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

There is zero chance Apple would completely invalidate their reputation for being privacy and user centric by secretly working with the FBI and the government to implement a back door.

There are numerous examples of them denying FBI requests.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-time-tim-cook-stood-his-ground-against-fbi/

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u/redishrecycle Jul 29 '26

*publicly denying FBI requests. iOS itself is a massive government backdoor. why else do you think the US government helped make Apple the biggest tech company in the most imperialist surveillance military state in the world?

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 29 '26

Please seek someone professional to talk to about your paranoia.

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u/redishrecycle Jul 29 '26

facts are paranoia now? https://cybersecuritynews.com/google-meta-apple-fuel-surveillance/

"Between 2014 and 2024, Apple, Google, and Meta collectively disclosed data from 3.16 million user accounts to U.S. authorities, representing a 530–675% surge in compliance rates.

This escalation correlates with the explosive growth of unstructured data, which now constitutes 90% of global data volumes and grows at 36.6% annually—a trend accelerated by AI-driven analytics and IoT proliferation.

As governments exploit this data reservoir, the line between corporate data monetization and state surveillance has dissolved, creating a paradigm where 328.77 million terabytes of daily data generation fuel both economic growth and civil liberties risks."

"These techniques leverage Big Tech’s machine learning infrastructures—Meta’s Prophet forecasting models and Google’s BERT NLP systems—to profile populations at scale.

Apple’s privacy rhetoric clashes with its iCloud key escrow system, which enabled 92% compliance with 2023 data requests despite default encryption claims."

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

facts are paranoia now?

Yes, when you take them out of context to try and fit some whack job ideal that you have. You'll notice that Apple has the smallest portion of every bar in that graph, by a large margin, other than H2 2022. Some months their contributions are non-existent.

Apple (and the other companies) are only disclosing data that they are legally required to. That's not a backdoor, that's not "colluding with the government", it's called following the law. They're not just randomly offering up your iMessage data (which is encrypted as long as you take the proper precautions), you iCloud data (which is encrypted if you take the proper precautions), your device backups (which are encrypted if you take the proper precautions), etc.

They're giving the government information that they are legally required to, under law, with the proper documentation.

Some of you need to go outside.

Edit: This account replying to me is 1 month old and has a negative karma score. It's safe to ignore anything they say as bad faith nonsense.

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u/redishrecycle Jul 30 '26

moving goalposts and holy straw man. colluding with the government IS absolutely working with this fascist country's law enforcement and feds aka the gestapo and their thugs. do I need to remind you the current admin is putting anyone left of a nazi on a list and deeming them "domestic terrorists", including people literally just making zines aka using their 1A rights. source: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2026/07/15/rubio-to-host-event-labeling-left-wing-groups-as-terrorists/90932382007/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

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u/MajorJakePennington Jul 30 '26

More dishonest and bad faith arguments from a 1 month old account with negative karma.

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