The government says destroying his own data during an airport interrogation was illegal.
A few things of note:
This is why people to your left have been chiding you about the "pedo" panic: now, the government can accuse you of being a "pedo" to justify committing crimes against you.
This is why people to your left have been chiding you about the "terrorist" moniker: for the last half century, the government can accuse you of being a "terrorist" to justify committing crimes against you.
The American government is claiming, simultaneously, that they had the right to search the phone because it was a routine search (ie, they searched without evidence of wrongdoing), and that saying that password was destruction of evidence because the phone contained evidence (ie, they searched due to evidence of wrongdoing).
While this is technically a legal argument to make, it seems very unlikely to lead to a conviction because it's hard to prove to a jury beyond reasonable doubt that the government both does and does not have evidence of wrongdoing.
You may beat the case, but you can't beat the ride.
The purpose of this lawfare isn't to get a conviction; the purpose is to make his activism more difficult. They arrest him and hold him and charge him and release him and slowly grind him down. He's currently out on bond. If they arrest him again for another bullshit charge, they can revoke his bond for the first bullshit charge.
All of this cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They don't care about getting a conviction. They care about making his life and his activism as difficult as possible in hopes that the future he is fighting for does not come to pass.
also, and this is important from a legal perspective, if they don’t drop the charges ultimately and it does go to court and they do get a conviction, they’ve just set legal precedent that allows them to continue doing this to anyone. per the article, this is the first example of law enforcement using that particular law to press charges related to destruction of data on a phone, but if they succeed in making the argument then that makes it much harder for the next person to defend themselves because prosecutors can point back to this case and the fact that the court upheld the argument.
it will then require supreme court appeals and legal revision to change that, or legislative action to ban this type of behavior on the part of law enforcement. which is not likely to happen with the current court appointments and political environment.
so either way they harass activists and discourage anti-law enforcement action, and in the best case (for them) they get to mold the law to their benefit.
