Technology

I’ll say this: a possible destruction of evidence charge is the bulwark against whatever evidence might have been destroyed, the possession of which could have been a much more egregious charge. Not saying they actually possessed any criminal evidence, but the legal theory behind the concept plays this out. If, perhaps, they possessed some dangerous or damaging documents, a “destruction of evidence“ charge would be nothing compared to some potentially much more terrible charges they could possibly suffer from the discovery of, say, whatever else you could possibly imagine. Although there is no evidence this person possessed anything of the sort, let alone anything illegal at all.

And while this is a total bullshit charge that this person only could’ve gotten “outside of the protections of the constitution” that only theoretically exists before this person “crossed the border”, as a US citizen, this is still only legal theory that hasn’t quite been tested yet.

As others have mentioned, this is precisely what this feature is for. Other technology companies have similar protections, although they institute it slightly differently.

Apple, for example, has instituted in accessibility protections on its devices in a slightly different manner. For example, if you think that your device might be accessed without your permission, you can enable lockdown mode by clicking the power button five times to enable several additional layers of encryption. It also turns off every possible wired and wireless port of access to your device. It also lowers the tolerance for incorrect passwords from 5 to 3, and after three incorrect password entries, instead of locking down the device for several hours, it immediately initiate a device wipe that cannot be interrupted by a power down.

This mitigates the need for a “dress password“ and this may have a legal difference, since providing the correct password won’t be necessary and shift the liability to the authority entering a “guessed“ password. so either that authority can continue incorrectly, guessing your password or can simply shut the device off and leave it in some archive somewhere to never be accessed.

These are subtle differentiations, and different approaches, and these tech companies are attempting these different approaches with successes and failures in an attempt to help their customers maintain privacy. And, until tested, we can only guess at their successes and failures.

This is one of those times.