On January 24, 2025, Atlanta resident Sam Tunick was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport when returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic.
Tunick was repeatedly asked to unlock his phone during the interrogation. He provided the agents a passcode. The agents entered it, but it didn’t unlock the phone. Instead, before their eyes, the phone wiped itself clean of all data. This is a security feature of the open-source mobile operating system GrapheneOS, intended to boost security by preventing unwanted access even if the owner is under duress.
