In charging a man for allegedly typing in a duress password which wiped his privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone, the U.S. government is trying to intimidate other activists from protecting their data and participating in social movements, Samuel Tunick, the man charged, told 404 Media in an interview on Tuesday.

The case of Tunick, who participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, has resonated across privacy and civil liberties circles. 404 Media first broke news of the case in December. Last week, The Guardian reported additional details including from a court hearing in the case. The maximum sentence for the alleged crime is five years in federal prison.

“I hope people understand that the charges against me are meant to intimidate people against protecting their data and their privacy, and the government hopes to set a precedent that no one has the right to privacy,” Tunick told 404 Media in a conference call with his federal public defender Matthew Dodge.

Asked about his reaction to the wide attention his case has gotten, Tunick said it’s “a little surprising, but encouraging that people seem to care about this issue.”

In January 2025, Tunick was returning to the U.S. from a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Dodge explained that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers called the airport ahead, said Tunick was coming through, and asked officers to stop him. “‘We want you to get his phone and search his phone,’” the officers said in Dodge’s retelling. 

The officers asked Tunick if they could search his bags, and he said no. The agents searched them anyway and found nothing unlawful, Dodge said. Tunick declined to be patted down, but again the agents searched him anyway, and they found nothing improper, Dodge said. Then the agents said they wanted to search his phone. Tunick declined and asked for his lawyer multiple times. Finally, the agents asked for his phone, and gave a pretence of searching for child abuse imagery, according to Dodge.

Tunick gave a code which an officer typed into the device, Dodge said. Rather than unlocking the phone, the device “went to a blank screen” and displayed the GrapheneOS logo, Dodge explained. GrapheneOS, a mobile operating system that has a wealth of privacy and security upgrades, has a duress password feature that “will irreversibly wipe the device,” according to GrapheneOS’s website. Asked for comment, Daniel Micay, the founder of GrapheneOS, pointed 404 Media to a recently published overview on the operating system’s defenses against data extraction.

With the phone inaccessible, Tunick was free to go and left the airport. Around a year later he was indicted for allegedly destroying “the digital contents of a Google Pixel” phone. Dodge said he only found one other case using the same law, a drug trafficking investigation. “This is extraordinarily rare,” Dodge said.

“The agents tried to rig this game by making this all come to a head at the airport,” he added. Ordinarily authorities would need a warrant to search the contents of someone’s phone; at an airport, those protections often do not apply. “They could have asked the judge for a search warrant for Sam’s phone if they thought they had evidence of a crime. They didn’t do that,” Dodge added.

DHS and the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

In the interview with 404 Media, Tunick put his prosecution squarely in the context of the sprawling cases against other Stop Cop City protesters and other activists in the U.S. more broadly. He pointed to the RICO charges against dozens of people, with 61 of those charges later being dropped (some still faced domestic terrorism charges). Tunick said that case had him listed as an unindicted co-conspirator. 

Tunick also pointed to the landmark domestic terrorism Prairieland case in which people protested an ICE facility (one of those people received a 100 year sentence for shooting a police officer), and the newly signed National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) which the ACLU says seeks to target nonprofits and activists.

“The government hopes to set a precedent that no one has the right to privacy.”

“Many of us had a suspicion that this was kind of the resting ground for a new, more heavy-handed trend in policing in America. And that does seem to be in fact the case: that Atlanta was sort of the testing ground for a more authoritarian, heavy-handed approach to social movements,” Tunick said. As 404 Media reported in March, Proton Mail provided user data that helped the FBI unmask an anonymous Stop Cop City protester.

Tunick described to 404 Media how before the airport encounter, he tried to get a job at a Christmas tree lot. The job involved going onto the property of a school, so it required a background check. Despite not having a criminal record, he failed the background check, Tunick said. He went to the Atlanta Public Schools office to find out why, and was eventually given a phone number and told to contact the FBI, Tunick recalled. He also said a hidden camera was placed outside a house he used to live in.

Later, he found out from his lawyer that a tracker had been placed on his car. He also learned his cellphone records were subpoenaed, and he said he got an email from Google saying his Gmail account had also been subpoenaed.

“They really just tried to dig up anything they could on me and they didn't find anything,” Tunick said. “At this point, it almost seems like it’s just intended to make my life miserable and discourage participation in any sort of advocacy or activism.”

Initially, Tunick was shocked by the phone wiping charge, he said. Once that feeling faded, he said the charges made sense in the arc of government “repression that we’ve seen over the last year and a half.”

Regarding his case about being charged for allegedly wiping a phone, Tunick said, “I just hope that other citizens and activists understand that this is not a precedent that we should allow to be set.”

LEIDEN (ANP) - Door de aanhoudende droogte en de steeds lagere aanvoer van water via de Rijn neemt de verzilting in het westen van Nederland toe. Zout zeewater trekt steeds verder het binnenland in. Het Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland, dat een deel van het kustgebied in Noord- en Zuid-Holland beheert, verwacht door het watertekort snel "pijnlijke maatregelen" te moeten nemen.

"Het houdt een keer op, de situatie begint echt zorgelijk te worden", zegt dijkgraaf Rogier van der Sande. "Milde schade is beter dan grote schade, zoals het doorbreken van de dijken. Als waterschap is het onze belangrijkste taak om de dijken stabiel te houden. Daarvoor hebben we wel water nodig, desnoods zeewater. Als dit zo doorgaat, kan het betekenen dat we maatregelen moeten nemen. We zitten echt op het randje."

Zo kan Rijnland besluiten om de sluis in Spaarndam, bij Haarlem, helemaal dicht te houden. De sluisdeuren gaan nu al minder vaak open dan normaal om zoveel mogelijk zoet water vast te houden. Het hoogheemraadschap overweegt ook voor het eerst een verbod in te stellen op het gebruik van water uit sloten, beken en kanalen voor het besproeien van tuinen, sportvelden en landbouwgewassen. In het zuiden en oosten geldt zo'n onttrekkingsverbod al weken.

Voor Rijnland is het ook een optie om meer zout water het gebied in te laten, om te zorgen dat er in ieder geval genoeg water is. Dan ontstaat weliswaar verdere verzilting, maar de schade blijft volgens Van der Sande relatief beperkt. "Iedereen die van het water gebruik wil maken, gaat daar last van hebben. Maar beter zout water en wel dijken, dan geen dijken en in feite je gebied opofferen. We accepteren milde schade om grote schade te voorkomen. En dus accepteren we ook dat er dan wat meer verzilting optreedt."

A youth movement born from exam leaks and online mockery has pierced Narendra Modi’s aura of invincibility and may yet reshape Indian politics

“What if all cockroaches come together?” was the question that humbled India’s strongman prime minister, Narendra Modi. It was posted on X by Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student in the US with a master’s in public relations. Enraged that India’s top judge likened unemployed youths to insects and “parasites”, and that millions saw medical exams compromised by leaks, Mr Dipke lit a fuse. For India’s nearly 400 million gen Z, public exams are often the only ladder to a secure future. When papers leak or tests are cancelled, that ladder is kicked away. By June, young people were protesting peacefully in Delhi as the Cockroach Janta party (CJP), a parody of Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). They demanded the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.

This weekend, Mr Pradhan became the first senior minister in Mr Modi’s 12 years in power to be forced from office by a mass-protest movement. It came after credible reports suggested police officers attacked protesters marching to parliament. Security sources say it was they who were attacked. This may be just the beginning. The concession has taught the Cockroach movement’s leadership that pressure works. They could have declared victory and gone home. Instead they have accused the government of breaching the terms of the settlement offered by Mr Modi’s government. The CJP claims at least 100 people have been arrested, many on non-bailable charges. Its leaders are now demanding the release of detainees and threatening to remobilise nationally.

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New research linking the issue to Parkinson’s disease adds to the evidence of serious health repercussions from traffic volume and other sources

The roar of late-night traffic is not just annoying for those trying to sleep. It can also have profound effects on their health. A pioneering new study, published this month, has found a clear link between road noise and Parkinson’s disease. The research, which followed more than 3 million Danish participants, found a modest but consistent effect: for every 11.5dB rise in noise level, the risk of the degenerative disorder rose by 3% over the 18-year study.

The study adds to the growing body of evidence that auditory nuisance is associated with serious physical consequences. The European Environment Agency reported last year that more than 110 million people across the continent suffer high levels of health-damaging noise pollution, with physiological stress and sleep disturbance leading to 66,000 early deaths annually as well as heart disease, diabetes and depression. It found that the harm caused was greater than from secondhand tobacco smoke exposure.

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Conservationists are thrilled at the arrival of three juvenile birds at Willington Wetlands, hoping more will follow

A long orange beak poked curiously out from its wooden crate, followed by a sleek head and slender body. Then the first white stork of the morning flapped its wings and took to the air. Moments later a second emerged tentatively to stalk through the long grass, followed closely by a final sibling who stretched its wings and explored the length of the enclosure.

The trio of juvenile white storks have just arrived at their new home in Willington Wetlands in Derbyshire and conservationists are hopeful that their presence will kickstart the return of the birds to the Midlands after an absence of more than 600 years.

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Jess Asato’s particulars of claim states Grok added explicit sexual material users had not asked for

A Labour MP who is taking legal action against Elon Musk’s xAI company over fake sexualised images created by Grok says the AI tool was instructed to operate with “no restrictions on adult sexual content or offensive content”.

Jess Asato’s lawyers published her particulars of claim in the case on Tuesday, which included details of publicly posted instructions that the claim says illustrate how Grok was trained to generate harmful sexualised content.

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The top 101 photos from the International Aerial Photographer of the Year, which doesn't have the best UI, so you can see samples at this Atlantic gift link, Petapixel, Colossal, Sydney Morning Herald, DIY Photography

Carole Pope: Canada's Original Queer Icon

The former Rough Trade frontwoman is the focus of Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions, a documentary about her career. (Link to CBC Streaming) Link to her website here. And the song that made she and her band famous in Canada for its unabashed lesbian lust, High School Confidential by Rough Trade.