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Comment by tessi3r | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the only logical solution is to carry a hammer to destroy your phone if necessary.

If the heat hasn't told you they want your phone, there's nothing legally stopping you from destroying your own property if you see them coming...

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Yeah, the court would never figure that one out and charge with destruction of evidence!

"Why did you destroy your phone?"

"I was angry at losing a game of Pocket Tanks and I have anger management issues"

Court’s have never seen an excuse like that before. They’ll never figure it out!

Fortunately criminal courts require proof. If you have a lawyer ... this won't happen (probably).

For that to stick they would need proof that there was some evidence on the phone. Since the only way to prove that something was evidence on the phone is to know what was on the phone I'd expect that to be thrown out immediately.

If they were able to get the phones contents from some other avenue then destroying the phone had no purpose.

> For that to stick they would need proof that there was some evidence on the phone.

They can make your life pretty fucking miserable while that's going on though.

And the innocence tax is pretty high. Most people on HN can afford good lawyers. What's the going rate for a good criminal defence team for a year?

Independently of legal risks, please everyone keep in mind that modern cell phone batteries are a serious hazard.

Perfect, I just need to carry a punch that's able to puncture the battery...

Immediately cause your mobile device to self-immolate on demand!

On some level this is why I'm skeptical of all security efforts in the electronic space.

Because if the government or anyone sufficiently powerful is actually after me, the first thing I'm going to do is throw my phone down the garbage disposal and blindly dd all my hard drives with zeros.

Unfortunately this plan relies on you knowing that they are after you. In the case of a raid when you're not home, you won't have access to the hard drives to erase them.

Tampering with evidence, which includes destroying evidence is also a crime. IANAL so I'm not sure at what point a phone becomes evidence, i.e. once there is a indictment, once there is a warrant, t=0, etc. John Carmack got in trouble for deleting emails in that IP case if I recall. A better privacy feature might be that the phone stores no history.

Or snap it in half, most phones will do this easily.

Would you, under immediate threat, be able to locate and destroy the memory chips—and specifically the memory chips—on your phone? If they're prepared to lock you up for 10 years, they're prepared to do some serious digital forensics on some unsnapped chips.

Hence, the hammer.

Would factory resetting your phone be sufficient, or is data still recoverable even after the standard factory reset option on Android (and I assume, iPhones)? I don't really know much about these "serious forensics."

If the storage is encrypted (standard on iOS, depends for Android) then the data should be pretty well unrecoverable.

We found JerryRigEverything's HN!

How does that prevent the judge from construing that as refusal to unlock your phone, and handing you a ten year sentence?

I usually have my foot with me.

Foot + phone + ground = destroyed phone

But, with enough resources they could still read the memory in the phone even if it was smashed.

Dump it in a bottle of Gatorade or coconut water.

will the electrolytes aid in the destruction?

It's what electronics crave!

Yes, the conductivity of electrolytes in solution will tend to short out conductive pathways in the short term, and contribute to corrosion of exposed metals later on.

If the ground is solid and the police let you destroy evidence while they're detaining you.

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