AINEWS
Federal prosecutors argue a privacy phone's 'duress' wipe — a second passcode designed to erase a device under coercion — counts as destruction of government seizable property, a theory no court has tested.
On January 24, 2025, at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Samuel Tunick typed a passcode into his Google Pixel during secondary inspection and watched the phone erase its own contents. The passcode was a "duress" code, and the Department of Justice is now prosecuting him for the wipe in what two security and civil-liberties experts say is the first known U.S. federal case built around a phone's duress-wipe feature. The code was built into GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused Android replacement that security-conscious users install on Pixel phones in place of the stock operating system.
A duress code is a deliberate second unlock: enter it under coercion and the device is meant to look like a normal login while deleting the user's data in the background. The feature exists for the same reason a safe has a second combination: a coerced user can satisfy the demand without giving up what is actually inside. Tunick's attorneys confirmed to The Guardian that his phone was running GrapheneOS at the time of the search.
The indictment, filed and sealed on November 13, 2025 in the Northern District of Georgia and unsealed this summer, charges Tunick under 18 U.S.C. § 2232(a), a statute The Guardian describes as "a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized." The charging document alleges that the passcode Tunick entered caused the phone to "delete the digital contents," in the language quoted by TechCrunch from the filed indictment. A motion to seal the case was entered the same day, and an order on the motion followed on the docket.
The government's theory runs in two layers. The first is the property-destruction charge: by triggering the wipe, the indictment argues, Tunick destroyed something the government was positioned to seize. The second is the constitutional backdrop of the border-search exception, which the defense motion places at the center of the dispute. Border agents operate under a long-standing exception to the warrant requirement, and the government has historically taken the position that the border is not U.S. soil for Fourth Amendment purposes until a person is authorized to enter. Whether that doctrine reaches a phone whose owner allegedly destroyed its contents before any search began is the question the case now puts on the docket.
Tunick's defense tells a different story. The motion to suppress alleges that the secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson was a pretext, and that the underlying investigative target was Tunick's association with Defend the Atlanta Forest, the environmental movement opposing the planned Atlanta public-safety training facility known as "Cop City." The defense further alleges that agents denied Tunick access to counsel and never administered a Miranda warning, and that a child-exploitation rationale was invoked to mask the inquiry. Those are defense allegations, not court findings, and they are contested.
Christophe Boutry told The Guardian he had not seen a similar prosecution. "It's concerning, and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default," he said. Bill Buddington said the same: to his knowledge, no federal case has previously turned on a duress-wipe feature. Both characterizations are journalistic and expert, not judicial, but they describe a real gap in the case law.
If the prosecution's theory holds, the practical reach of the case is wider than one activist's phone. Duress passcodes are not exotic: any GrapheneOS user can enable one with a few taps, and comparable wipe-on-coercion features have appeared in other security tools. Treating the deliberate use of such a feature as destruction of government-seizable property would, in effect, criminalize the design, even for travelers with no political affiliation and no case on their record. The defense is expected to argue that the statute targets destruction of someone else's property, not a user's choice to delete their own data.
The case is active. A first hearing was held the Monday before The Guardian's July 23, 2026 report, and the docket at CourtListener shows the indictment, the motion to seal, and the order on the motion to seal as the public entries so far. Tunick has not been tried. The statute's text, the constitutional question, and the duress feature itself are all in play.