A federal phone search at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport has turned into a criminal case testing where privacy protections end and obstruction begins.
Samuel Tunick, a 30-year-old activist tied to opposition against Atlanta’s police and fire training center known by critics as “Cop City,” was stopped by Customs and Border Protection officers in January 2025 while returning from the Dominican Republic, according to reporting cited from The New York Times.
Authorities wanted to search his Google Pixel phone. Tunick eventually handed it over, but the passcode he provided triggered a feature in GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused mobile operating system, that erased the phone’s contents when officers entered it, according to the report.
Federal prosecutors call it obstruction
Tunick is now facing federal obstruction charges alleging he “knowingly” destroyed, damaged, wasted or disposed of digital contents to prevent or impair a government search.
Law Commentary reported that Tunick has pleaded not guilty and that the case remains pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
Theodore Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, told Atlanta News Now: “Obstructing federal law enforcement is a serious matter that has serious repercussions. 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.”
Tunick frames it as a privacy measure
Tunick told The New York Times that he used the security setup because he wanted to protect personal information from government and corporate access.
“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,” Tunick told the Times.
He also told the outlet that the charges stem from a national security memo calling for investigations into participants in “criminal and terroristic conspiracies,” including organized networks behind targeted campaigns of “intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech.”
CBP says border searches are lawful and rare
A Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman told The New York Times that the agency has authority to search electronic devices of people entering or leaving the United States, including U.S. citizens, to enforce laws involving terrorism, national security threats and other matters.
The spokeswoman also said electronic devices belonging to less than 0.01% of international travelers were searched in the last fiscal year.
Tunick described himself as one of “hundreds of thousands” of people in the movement opposing the Atlanta training center. He told the Times he was initially drawn to the issue from an “environmental justice” perspective and objected to what he described as expanding and militarizing police while many Americans were demanding the opposite.
The case now centers on a narrow but consequential question: when a traveler uses privacy software that destroys data during a government search, is that a legitimate attempt to protect personal information or a crime meant to block law enforcement?
