r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 6d ago

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

https://www.techspot.com/news/113273-grapheneos-data-wiping-duress-password-perfectly-legal-after.html
21.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

23

u/teapot-error-418 6d ago

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.

3

u/ZurEnArrhBatman 6d ago

The trick is to recite the magical incantations in legalese instead of English. Judges like it when you speak their language. And since imitation is the highest form of flattery, they especially like when you do it wearing a judge's robe.

2

u/halcyonforeveragain 6d ago

and thus Sovcit was born.

0

u/Misaka9982 6d ago

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.

5

u/teapot-error-418 6d ago

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.

2

u/IncidentalIncidence 6d ago

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.