DOJ Charges Atlanta Man Over GrapheneOS Phone Wipe in First-of-Its-Kind Case

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta have charged Sam Tunick under a statute that criminalizes destroying property to prevent its seizure, after his phone wiped itself during a border search at Hartsfield-Jackson airport. Tunick runs GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused open-source OS for Google Pixel phones that supports duress passcodes capable of erasing a device. When agents pressured him to unlock the phone and he entered a code, the screen flashed and the device restarted, losing its data. Prosecutors are treating that wipe as intentional evidence destruction; the defense counters that the entire search was unconstitutional and wants the evidence suppressed. Security experts, including EFF technologist Bill Buddington, say they’ve never seen the law aimed at an operating system before, and warn the theory effectively frames GrapheneOS as criminal by default.

The encounter itself is contested. Tunick was returning from the Dominican Republic when agents — who had already flagged him internally over alleged ties to the movement against Atlanta’s “Cop City” police training facility — pulled him into secondary screening. His defense says the interrogation used child sexual abuse material as a pretext to probe his protest connections, that he was denied a lawyer four times, and that agents produced no warrant and never read him his rights. CBP officers describe it as a routine inspection looking for prohibited material.

The case sharpens a broader question: how far constitutional protections extend at borders and international airports, where authorities wield expanded search powers. It also lands amid a pattern of treating hardened privacy tools as inherently suspicious — in Catalonia, police have reportedly profiled Pixel owners as presumed GrapheneOS users and drug dealers. A ruling on the suppression motion isn’t expected before late October, making this an early test of whether using strong device security can itself become the basis for a federal charge.