Opportunity costs

Last week, many media reported that in January 2025 a US citizen named Sam Tunick, arriving at the international airport in Atlanta, was stopped for questioning and told to hand over his phone. It appears that he gave the border agent a “duress password” – an unlocking code that wiped the phone when the agent typed it in. This feature is included in his phone’s operating system, GrapheneOS. Now he’s being charged with a felony. At the Guardian, Timothy Pratt reports that without his knowledge, Tunick had been put on a terrorism watch list because of his alleged connections to protests against the giant, new, and controversial police training center known as Cop City. The government’s lawyers have apparently described this stop as, as Pratt has it, “an everyday interrogation at an international airport, ‘looking for anything that’s prohibited’.” Both that description and the event itself remind that rights are scarce at borders. The government is prosecuting Tunick under a law…