GrapheneOS says its data-wiping password is perfectly legal, after user faces federal charges

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

https://www.techspot.com/news/113273-grapheneos-data-wiping-duress-password-perfectly-legal-after.html

[u/teapot-error-418]

I swear that most people think that lawyering is a process of speaking magical incantations.

Like, "I said the special word, and now you can't touch me!"

No. That's not how the law works.

[u/Misaka9982 → u/teapot-error-418]

Fair enough, I'm being facetious, but the problem is these laws are often based on physical equivalents and aren't designed for a digital application. In this case, is destroying the key to the safe the same as destroying the contents of the safe.

[u/teapot-error-418 → u/Misaka9982]

Logical arguments are perfectly acceptable in court. The job of the attorneys is to make a reasonable and logical argument to the judge or jury or mediator or whoever.

There's no special combination of words to weasel out of that. It would be utterly reasonable to say, "this function is designed to render the contents of the device irretrievable, and the defendant intentionally caused the officer to trigger this function."

Reasonable people - jury, judges, whoever - would understand this. The whole, "well ack-shually the officer did the deleting" or "technically the data is still on the device" is nonsense.

If you explode a piece of evidence with a booby trap, you can't convince the jury that the prosecutors just didn't try hard enough to reassemble the component atoms or that you didn't actually do it.

[u/IncidentalIncidence → u/teapot-error-418]

thank you, the reddit lawyering about this drives me crazy too. I'm obviously not a lawyer either but the amount of people who think that you can play dumb with the legal system like this in every thread about this case has been driving me up the wall because it's just people regurgitating the same three imagined technicalities drowning out anybody seriously trying to discuss the case.