this is just intimidation of an activist
The ACLU will probably crush the Governments arguments and we will never hear anything more but this guy. And his family and friends are for sure being intimidated by the state because he destroyed his own property before they could illegally search it.
In my comment elsewhere, I suggested that he wiped his phone before ever being approached. You can’t have committed a crime here if you did not know you were under investigation. It’s not destruction of evidence if there is no investigation.
A lot of people will wipe their phone when getting off the plane so that there is nothing searchable on it. When they get home, they then add it back to their account and move on with life.
Article doesn’t go into it, but what likely happened was that he has everything cloud-synced on his phone and did just that. They decided that they wanted his data but he’d wiped it before they approached him. This arrest and charge is all about them being sad that they couldn’t properly harass him, so they are harassing him in a different way. It will go absolutely nowhere.
Thats a charge I would wear with pride.
