It all started when Sam Tunick, described as a 30-year-old barista and musician with concerns about the environment and police militarization, returned to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia on Jan. 24, 2025, after a vacation in the Dominican Republic.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped Tunick and insisted that he give them his phone and the password to unlock it. Federal authorities had already put Tunick on a terrorism watchlist because of his protest efforts against a police training facility planned for the Atlanta area, according to W. Matthew Dodge, Tunick’s lawyer.

But agents told Tunick that they were investigating child pornography, Dodge says. Tunick’s Google Pixel phone was running GrapheneOS, an operating system that allows for an emergency code that can wipe the phone’s digital content. Tunick provided agents with a password that destroyed the phone’s contents when they used it.

In November 2025, a grand jury indicted Tunick under a statute that makes it a felony to destroy property to prevent it from being seized.

The case appears to be a “major turning point in digital privacy law” as the U.S. Department of Justice tests a “completely novel legal theory by treating a native software security method as the criminal destruction of evidence,” says Kyle Courtney, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, where he teaches cyber law and privacy.

Historically, he says, the statute—18 U.S.C. Section 2232—requires a “physical act of destruction, like smashing a hard drive with a hammer or throwing a laptop into a river.”

Applying the statute to an automated phone wipe “could set up a profound precedent,” Courtney says.

Courtney says he has “deep skepticism” about whether Tunick’s “conduct fits into the contours of the statute.”

“Proving that entering a duress PIN under threat of phone seizure is the legal equivalent of intentionally destroying physical evidence is a massive hurdle for the government,” he says.

Dodge says lawyers with the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta, where he works, know of no other time that the statute has been used to prosecute a personn activating digital security features.

Tunick faces a possible five-year prison sentence.

“Obstructing federal law enforcement is a serious matter that has serious repercussions,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg of the Northern District of Georgia said in a statement. “Individuals who destroy or attempt to destroy property, including data, to prevent lawful search and seizure should expect to face prosecution and punishment for their actions.”

Tunick moved from Chicago to Atlanta in 2022 and joined up with Defend the Atlanta Forest, which had been opposing the opening of a “Cop City” law enforcement training complex on woodland in DeKalb County, Georgia, according to Dodge.

Federal and local law enforcement agencies have been investigating and pursuing people involved with the “Stop Cop City” for domestic terrorism and protests that have sometimes turned violent. Tunick’s lawyers say he was targeted at the airport because of his political activism.

Tunick was stopped at the airport by federal agents and placed in secondary inspection, where he repeatedly asked to speak with his lawyer and was ignored, according to the defense’s court documents.

In a July federal court hearing, Tunick’s lawyers argued that any evidence and statements should be suppressed because the government’s actions against him violated his constitutional rights.

Dodge says he expects a ruling on the motion “sometime this winter.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has found that constitutional rights, such as the Fourth Amendment, are diminished at the border, even for U.S. citizens. The reasoning behind the “border search exception” is the government’s heightened security interests.

But Dodge argues that there’s a split in the circuit courts as to what level of suspicion, if any, law enforcement must have at the border to search someone’s cellphone.

The circuit courts that have addressed manual searches of phones at the border have found them as minimally intrusive as scanning luggage, but a few, like the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at San Francisco, have found that there must be reasonable suspicion for a forensic search of a phone.

A forensic search generally involves external hardware or software to copy, analyze or extract a device's data.

The 11th Circuit at Atlanta held that agents can run a forensic search of a phone at the border without the requirement of reasonable suspicion.

“Our entire life is on our cellphone,” Dodge says, adding that Tunick’s case highlights why “there should be some requirement that there is reasonable suspicion” before a phone search.

Daniel Richman is a professor at Columbia Law School, where he specializes in national security, privacy and cybersecurity law. Richman says the facts of the case as reported so far “seem to fall within the statute,” 18 U.S.C. Section 2232.

Richman adds that he could “envision a wide range of cases in which someone’s intentional wiping of his phone to avoid a lawful search would be well worth prosecuting.” However, if this case goes to a jury, “one can never predict what will happen.”

The government, he says, “could be at a disadvantage if a jury sees this case as a referendum on whether the government should be going after participants in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, at least in the absence of any personal involvement in violence.”

Kabbas Azhar is a fellow with Equal Justice Works at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Azhar says Border Patrol agents can’t force a person to divulge a phone password, and had Tunick simply refused, “he would be well within his rights.”

However, because Tunick made the “active decision” to provide a duress passcode, his action “could be construed as preventing or impairing the government’s lawful authority to take control of the property,” Azhar says.

Of particular concern, Azhar says, is the allegation that federal agents were attempting to bypass normal investigation methods and restrictions to get information about Tunick’s protest efforts.

“Samuel Tunick’s case shows exactly why the border search exception imperils our civil liberties and ought to be restricted,” Azhar says. “Law enforcement can use their broad search authorities to go on fishing expeditions to investigate matters that have no connection to immigration enforcement.”