Samuel Tunick was returning to the United States in January 2025 from a vacation in the Dominican Republic when he was pulled aside during a customs search at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Customs and Border Protection officers wanted to search his phone. After questioning, he eventually turned it over but gave officers a passcode that then erased the contents of his Google Pixel phone.
As result, federal prosecutors in Atlanta have charged him with obstruction.
The case of Mr. Tunick, 30, became widely known last month after news reports of his federal court hearing in Atlanta. Mr. Tunick, a musician who has taught at a Jewish day school and tutored students, is also a left-wing activist and a graduate student in geography at Georgia State University.
He said that he has been ensnared by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive issued by President Trump last September that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include crimes like getting in the way of immigration enforcement.
His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific code is entered.
“Obstructing federal law enforcement is a serious matter that has serious repercussions,” Theodore Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for 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.”
A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency had the authority to search the electronic devices of anyone entering or leaving the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud and national security threats.
“The border search will only include an examination of information that is present on the device at the time it is presented for inspection,” the spokeswoman said, adding that it searched the electronic devices of fewer than 0.01 percent of all arriving international travelers in the last fiscal year.
In an interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, Mr. Tunick explained how he ended up in this situation.
Why did you decide to replace your phone’s default software with Graphene OS, which can delete the phone’s contents?
Knowing the kind of surveillance that activists have been subjected to, it just seems like a good idea to protect my private data that I don’t necessarily want corporations or governments to have access to, just out of the principle of privacy.
Some people think that if you have that software, you’re trying to hide something.
If someone you don’t know, who’s actively hostile to you, is trying to access your private data, your pictures, your messages or notes to self, that may be not something that you’d like.
Your lawyers have said that the government was investigating you over your association with the movement against “Cop City,” a planned police and fire training center in Atlanta. What are your views?
I was a participant, along with hundreds of thousands of other people in the movement.
I heard that people were trying to fight it, and I have a background in environmental studies. That’s what I got my bachelor’s degree in. I’m about to go back to school for geography, so the environmental justice issue struck a chord for me, but especially so when it was combined with this concerning trend that we’ve seen over the last several years of expanding and militarizing the police at the exact time when tens of millions of Americans are demanding the exact opposite.
How do you view the federal government’s approach to investigating this movement?
We don’t know for sure, but it’s interesting to me that my charges and the other federal charges come on the heels of NSPM-7, which is the Trump administration’s mandate to attack left-wing movements under the bogus pretense of domestic terrorism. I think we should just call that what it is, which is a direct attack on our First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly.
During these proceedings, it was revealed that the federal authorities had secretly placed you on a watch list. What was your reaction to learning you had been flagged as a suspected terrorist?
Initially, I was surprised and upset, but this was also after 40 or so Stop Cop City protesters and several dozen attendees of a music festival had been charged with domestic terrorism. So I was able to understand it in that context.
However, it’s not a pleasant experience to find out that you’ve just been placed on a watch list without any input from a judge, from a jury. They can justify all of this warrantless surveillance. Or they try to justify it, at least.
How has it affected your life?
It’s stressful to have potentially up to five years in prison looming over my head. I’m a musician. I tour occasionally. I have to get a judge’s approval anytime I want to leave the Northern District of Georgia.
All of my family lives on the West Coast, so I have to get a judge’s approval to visit them as well. I was forced to surrender my passport.
Just the knowledge that the government is peering into your private life in this way, trying to dig up dirt on you, even though it’s unsuccessful, is creepy.
Cybersecurity experts have expressed concern that your prosecution sends a message that using privacy tools like Graphene OS to delete your phone’s contents is criminal by default. So what message do you hope your defense sends?
I just hope to send the message that the government doesn’t own our data. The government doesn’t own our communications, our relationships, as hard as they might try to. We have to defend our fundamental right to privacy; otherwise we can’t say that we really live in a democracy.
