The FBI Is Keeping Lists Now - Part 2: Charged Over a Password - Trump’s Justice Department Turns Encryption Into a Crime

It begins with an email. A Department of Homeland Security official writes to Customs and Border Protection and to an FBI counterterrorism investigator, stating that a man named Sam Tunick is under investigation for alleged terrorist activities. No attack, no victims, no evidence - just a sentence in an inbox, and a traveler becomes a suspect before his feet even touch the ground.

Tunick, who authorities claim is connected to the resistance against the police training facility known as Cop City in Atlanta, returns from a vacation in the Dominican Republic on January 24, 2025. Federal officers move in as soon as he lands at Atlanta airport, even though he has done nothing. The questioning is not about activism, but about allegations that he possesses child sexual abuse material - something his attorneys say was nothing more than a pretext, the excuse used to dig into his ties to the Cop City protest movement. He asks for a lawyer four times. Four times he is denied. He is never read his rights. No search warrant is presented. The child abuse allegation the investigators confront him with is not meant to solve that crime. It is the battering ram they use to pry open his life in order to get at something entirely different - his political connections.

Then comes the phone. They tell him to unlock it or they will seize it. He provides a password. A CBP officer enters it, the screen goes black, flickers several times, and the device reboots. They tell him his electronics will be taken and returned within 30 days. He is allowed to leave - for the moment - empty-handed, knowing the government now has him marked like an open account. Then, in November, the indictment arrives, based on an obscure federal statute that prohibits destroying property to prevent its seizure. He is not charged over an underlying crime. He is charged because his phone locked itself.

A free person is someone who is entitled to one locked room, one place that does not have to be opened for anyone. Take away that lock, and you take away that person's freedom. Declare the lock itself a crime, and you have turned that person into a criminal before a single word has been spoken. That is the logic of power - it wants to know everything about the citizen while revealing nothing about itself. It kicks in every door belonging to the individual while keeping every one of its own locked. Anyone who refuses to surrender is treated as already guilty, and privacy itself becomes the confession long before anyone even asks what is supposedly being hidden.

The bitter irony is that the alleged weapon is nothing more than privacy software. Tunick's Google phone was running the open source operating system GrapheneOS, designed to protect personal privacy and equipped with a duress password that automatically wipes all data and digital SIM cards when entered. The very tool meant to protect citizens from unlawful government intrusion is now being used against him as evidence of a crime. It is not the burglar who stands trial, but the man who owned a lock. His attorneys are asking the court to suppress everything obtained during the interrogation and from the phone itself, arguing that investigators violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Tunick has pleaded not guilty, and the court is not expected to rule on that motion before the end of October. The case therefore remains ongoing.

Customs and Border Protection has the authority to search electronic devices at the border without a warrant and without individualized suspicion. Anyone who refuses to unlock a device risks having it confiscated. What makes this case different is that even using a password designed to erase data automatically is now being treated as criminal destruction of evidence. Anyone traveling with sensitive information would be wise not to carry it on the device itself, but instead keep it encrypted in cloud storage and cross the border with a phone that contains as little data as possible. A duress password that yesterday was considered a security feature may today become the basis for a criminal indictment.

Behind this lies a policy that reaches far beyond Tunick. It is part of the campaign this administration is pursuing under the directive known as NSPM-7, a national security presidential memorandum whose stated goal is to dismantle the political left, cut it off from financial institutions, arrest its members, and prosecute them. Legal experts say they know of no other case in which someone has been criminally charged solely for using a duress password. Every citizen has the right to protect personal data from unconstitutional searches, they argue, and especially in times of growing authoritarianism, that right should remain protected.

So far, the prosecutions against the Cop City activists have largely fallen apart. But last month, the Justice Department secured indictments against two of them, a move government officials explicitly celebrated as part of NSPM-7. The prosecutions are being led by a newly created anti-extremism unit known as the Joint Task Force Vanguard, which is tasked with combating what officials describe as anti-Americanism. On June 23, 2026, nine demonstrators were sentenced to decades in prison over a protest they held on July 4, 2025, outside the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where they used fireworks and loud noise during the demonstration. When these cases are viewed together, they do not resemble isolated incidents. They reveal a government apparatus that is increasingly treating dissent itself as a criminal offense.

Read also our article: Our investigation reveals: Anti-capitalism. Anti-Christian. Anti-American. The FBI is now compiling lists.

In the end, what remains is a case that reaches far beyond one defendant. A man is labeled a terrorism suspect through an email, interrogated about child sexual abuse material, denied a lawyer, questioned without being advised of his rights, questioned without a warrant, and ultimately indicted because a password wiped his phone. The order in which a constitutional state is supposed to operate has been turned upside down. The act no longer comes first, followed by suspicion. Instead, suspicion goes looking for an offense. And in a system like that, anyone who still insists on keeping a lock on their own door is no longer viewed by the government as cautious, but as guilty. A people who are no longer allowed to keep anything from their own government are no longer sovereign. They become nothing more than a file waiting to be opened.