So the legal contest may never get around to the specific and novel question of whether it’s legal to give border authorities a duress password. This is not a destruction-of-evidence case, remember; it’s being litigated as destruction of property to prevent seizure by the state. There’s no evidence at all, not even a bona fide suggestion or indication, that Tunick ever had anything illegal per se on the Android phone. And, after all, he handed over the phone, complete with the false password and the installed OS; it was the border agents’ own physical use of the phone, arguably, that compromised the information they were hoping to fish for.