Authored by M. Walter via AmericanThinker.com,
Do you, as an American citizen, have to hand over your cell phone — along with the access code to open it — upon a (warrantless) demand by a border agent at the airport?
There’s a case grinding through the courts about that right now because one man, a Mr. Sam Tunick, refused.
Not only did he refuse but he had an app on his phone that triggered its erasure once you keyed in a particular code to open it. That was the code he gave CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) when they demanded his code to open it. And then his phone was, indeed, erased right there on the spot, in the hands of the CBP agent.
That’s when CBP got really p***ed off.
According to the reporting on his case, this man was not a criminal. He was not under suspicion or surveillance for anything, so far as we know. He is not related to Spencer Tunick, an artist who famously creates mass nude photo shoots in public places. He was, in point of fact, a left-wing activist with environmental interests, but, again, without any contact with or prior interest from law enforcement that we know of.
He was just a guy. Coming home from an international trip (the Dominican Republic.).
You may well be thinking, “A left-wing activist with an erasure code? Sounds suspicious!”
Let me pause to explain why I don’t think so.
A “right-winger” I know just traveled internationally recently and she traveled with a
