Cop City protester Samuel Tunick was forced to turn over his password during a warrantless search. Tunick gave them his duress password, and Federal agents unknowingly wiped his phone. Prosecutors are going to try to persuade a court that deleting data to prevent a warrantless seizure is a crime.
The government’s indictment, which contains a typo (“Untied States Code”), accuses Tunick of allegedly providing a passcode to border agents that caused the phone to “delete the digital contents,” prior to the device being seized.
Tunick’s attorneys filed a motion to suppress the evidence, claiming that the detention and the seizure were unlawful. The motion said U.S. border authorities took Tunick into a secondary inspection at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport as he returned from overseas on January 24, 2025, but that he was repeatedly denied access to an attorney and was not informed of his legal rights.
Tunick’s attorneys accused the government of demanding access to his phone under the pretext of searching for child exploitation imagery, but without providing evidence to justify its suspicion. His motion to suppress argued that the government was instead investigating him over his association with a long-running environmental movement called Defend the Atlanta Forest, which opposes the development of a sprawling training campus for law enforcement in Atlanta dubbed “Cop City.”
TechCrunch
Agents got the password they demanded. It was not the password they wanted.
Previously:
• US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone
