Is it good? The wording of the law in the UK is not too dissimilar than 230 USC 2232, but the specific difference is the term legal possession in the latter law. The government needs to prove they were in the process of attempting to take legal possession of the data, and to meet that they either need to show a warrant or evidence that they knew something incriminating was on the device.
Other than that,
That was the crime.
Except that is not specifically a crime. There are a lot of "IF"s which are required to be met for that to be a crime, specifically if they knew in advance what data was on the phone when they were attempting to retrieve it, and if they had a lawful path to taking possession.
Simply wanting to search your stuff does not fit that definition. You're allowed to destroy your stuff. Also it's not illegal to trick anyone, but this is a bit of a legal grey area, so even if the government could proved they were attempting to take lawful possession of specific data on the phone (which I doubt), they *may* be in for a long battle about who actually did the destroying.
What you think should happen, and what the law specifically says in writing are not always the same thing. Personally I think the tricking someone else into destroying something should be a crime, but I'm not sure the law will agree.
LOL you're delusional. EU privacy laws are not only quite strong, they are often so strong as that some common sense government action is inhibited.
E.g. In Germany there are no average speed cameras, because data privacy laws prohibit a government from recording citizen information that can be used to track citizens (e.g. if the used a certain road) unless they have been accused of a crime. I.e. break the speed, record the license plate. But you can't record a license plate without knowing if the person has broken the speed, so you can't compare it to the next camera, thus privacy laws prohibit average speed cameras.
In the Netherlands the tax department just had a whole year's worth of cases tossed out of court regarding the registration of tax free company lease vehicles,
Every time any government has tried to enact back door laws, they have been thrown out by the ECJ because of
In Ireland the courts ordered government national security surveillance data destroyed because of privacy laws.
In fact the reason that cloud providers need to store EU citizen data within the EU is precisely because the EU has much stricter privacy laws than the USA.
No they can't. Not only is the law clear on that, case law has ruled on it as well.
False. An investigation does not make everything evidence. Obstruction and evidence tampering are terms that apply only to property that someone is trying to take into lawful possession. Searching through something is not lawful possession.
If the police search your phone while doing a house search and find you wiped it, you haven't obstructed justice according to 230 USC 2232.
If the police search your phone while doing a house search executing a specific warranty specifying the data on your phone and find you wiped it, then you have obstructed justice.
You are entitled to destroy your own stuff. It's only obstruction if someone is in the process of attempting to take lawful possession. That is a very VERY key phrase of that law.
If they had felt so confident in the fact there was evidence in there in the first place
This is going to work against them. If they weren't confident of what evidence was on the phone ("may have been" doesn't cut it), then there's no obstruction charge. You're entitled to destroy your own things.
If you flush drugs down the toilet when police show up and randomly ask to come in, you can't be charged with obstruction.
If you flush drugs down the toilet when police show up with a warranty to search for drugs reasonably assumed to be on your property you can be judged with obstruction.
You're not the judge, clearly, because you demonstrate you don't know how the law works. A judge doesn't make blind conscience calls, they interpret the law. The police are subject to an immediate stop when questioned. CBP are not. You may be held up to 72 hours without council legally and CBP can continue to question you, legally. You are of course not obliged to answer, but you've got a few days of waiting to do.
A judge wouldn't make an error of legal fact like you did.
And a judge isn't in a position to undo some of the the barbaric laws that the USA has currently applied at the border.
Oh, but surely they'll win, they indicted [strike]a ham sandwich[/strike] this man! And the Trump administration has such a spectacular record with high-profile prosecutions thusfar...
Are we allowed to lie to them?
Yes. Lying is not criminal for anyone. No one uses the term lying. The terms are the following:
Perjury - Making false statements under oath in a court of law, deposition, or official legal document.
Fraud - Deceiving someone with a false statement of material fact - there's a specific subset of things fraud can apply to.
False official statements: Lying to federal agents, police officers, or government officials during specific official investigations (being questioned by a police is not an example of this, declaring false income on your tax return is). There's a reason why they say something can be used against you in a court of law, the act of lying isn't the problem, the lie is usually evidence tied to guilt in some other crime.
Defamation - Making false, damaging statements about a person or business's reputation.
what is the actual fucking deal about a building full of computers?
We get it you're using a computer from the 90s, but even a modern personal computer is damn loud when the GPU kicks in and does actual work. Now put 20,000 of them next to each other and you end up with "a building" that generates considerable noise, uses considerable amount of land, and consumes a shitton of power raising prices for everyone.
Why don't we build a datacentre next to your home and see how you like it.
I guess what I'm getting at here is you already gave up your civil rights. Or if you didn't then your neighbor did for you.
You're being fatalist. The story here is that someone got charged with a crime, but an administration that has charged multiple people and failed spectacularly to prove their cases in court.
There's no reason to think he's going to jail. The most likely outcome is he's tied up in court for a short while the government gets embarrassed yet again by lawyers who can't even spell the name of their own country correctly on the court document (look it up, I'm not joking. Also they listed the wrong department on the court docket, that's the kind of prosecutors we're dealing with, if they had any fewer braincells they'd be pronounced braindead.)
Not pleasant, but also not jail.
When the laws and their interpretations allow for unchecked executive power to surveil, the outcome isn't surprising.
They actually don't. The issue here is that we're long past a period where government prosecutors are presumed to be competent. They have now brought one case after the other forward which has failed miserably and spectacularly. I suspect this one will be no different if you look at what they need to do to prove obstruction.
The legal system is such that you can be sued or charged with anything. That doesn't mean you will actually end up punished for it. The outcome here will be an embarrassing defeat to the government in court. It's just a pity the current government has no shame.
The American Citizen should be legislating that alright. By threatening to vote every motherfucker out of office who dares to forget THAT long-held rule over 200 years old.
In practice over 50% of voters will vote for an insurrectionist and about 35% will vote for him literally no matter what he does. So yeah, the majority of your population don't give a flying fuck about the constitution.
The border agents can view that as "Destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure"
Don't live your life reading only headlines. You quoted a headline, not the actual law. The actual law includes things such as "lawful authority to take into custody", "property". Those bits are key. A random search does not imply lawful authority over any specific property.
The government needs to prove they knew what was on the phone (define the property) and that they had reason to take it into lawful possession (there's a reason obstruction normally applies to warrants).
No need to write any legislature. The government these days has staffed prosecutors with incompetent numbskulls (they ones who misspelled their own country and also listed the wrong government agency on official court documents).
Also there's a legal grey area of who did the destroying here. But the case will fail before that even comes under discussion.
Moreover, there was no probable cause for the seizure of property, and without a court order for the retrieval of evidence (a search warrant) it remains his non-legally-encumbered property to do with as he pleases, including giving them the password that is a metaphorical string tied between the doorknob and a shotgun trigger.
I think you're arguing the wrong case there. You can have legally-encumbered property without a court order. US vs Plavcak ruled that already. But you do need to have suspicion that specific evidence was being destroyed.
The big reason the government will lose this case is that they don't know what was on the phone. You can't obstruct the government by destroying something they don't know about. This isn't even a constitutional case. This case will fall flat on its face because obstruction in general won't apply the way 18 USC 2232 is written.
The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.
