Tag: georgia

US prosecutors charge Atlanta man after GrapheneOS phone wipes itself during airport search

 A federal case in Atlanta is raising questions about a privacy-focused mobile operating system, with prosecutors arguing that its features were used to erase evidence. The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute Atlanta resident Sam Tunick under a federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

The case centers on Tunick’s use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a device clean.

Experts said the legal approach is unusual and may be the first time the law has been aimed at an operating system. “It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

The incident began at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on January 24 of last year. Tunick had just returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic when he was stopped for questioning. According to court testimony, federal agents had already circulated his name and photo internally, saying he was under investigation for “suspected terrorism activities” because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

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Princeton Study Shows How Bad Actors Can Exploit Georgia Elections To Expose How You Voted

A new analysis from Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy shows that a capable analyst — or even an ordinary AI model — can reconstruct the order in which most Georgia ballots were scanned and, by combining that order with other ordinary election records, determine how individual voters cast their ballots.

Using publicly available data from the state’s May 2026 primary, researcher Max Springer demonstrated the technique at scale, recovering the scanning order of roughly 1.5 million ballots (98.9 percent of in-person ballots) across 139 counties. In smaller example jurisdictions, the linkage was nearly complete: in Heard County every one of the 650 early in-person voters could be tied to a specific ballot, and in Ball Ground (Cherokee County) all 1,860 early voters were matched. In other words, the supposedly secret ballot is not nearly as secret as the public has been told.

Early voting compounds the vulnerability. Voters at vote centers come from multiple precincts and often use different ballot styles with different candidate choices. Those differences create additional data points that can improve the ability to isolate individuals inside the Cast Vote Records (the electronic files that list every candidate choice marked on each ballot). Match confidence will vary — some linkages can be made with near certainty, others with lower confidence — but a talented programmer or AI user can still perform substantial voter profiling.

In small towns and close-knit communities, the risks of exposure are obvious. Parents could identify teachers’ ballots. Employees could face pressure from employers, or bias from potential employers. Even people who never face overt pressure could still experience quiet discrimination.

Some voters already avoid primaries because they do not want their party preference known. The ability to reverse-engineer candidate choices in a general election would only increase the potential for intimidation and could open the door to a whole new form of doxing.

Many people assume election officials are supposed to be able to know how individuals voted. They are not. Georgia law requires “absolute secrecy” of the ballot. While election officials must handle anonymous ballots, the system also must not allow anyone — including poll officials, election boards, or the state’s vendors — to determine how any particular voter cast his ballot.

The ability to reconstruct individual voting choices — and potentially disclose them — raises serious legal concerns under Georgia law, but also carries substantial commercial and political value. In an era when major campaigns routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars, the ability to know how specific voters actually cast their ballots could be worth millions.

When that information can be assembled across multiple election cycles, the ability to build detailed, long-term voter profiles only grows stronger. That kind of data is useful to campaigns, advocacy groups, and anyone building sophisticated micro-targeting models. An insider at the state or county level with access to the original internal data files could face a clear temptation. The creation of traceable ballots must stop — while preserving the ability to audit the election.

Those concerns are heightened by the fact that Georgia’s Secretary of State’s office has already experienced multiple serious data exposures and breaches. In 2015, the office distributed voter files containing Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and birth dates for more than 6 million voters (the “PeachBreach”). In 2016-2017, a server at Kennesaw State University that handled statewide election preparation was found exposed to the internet, containing millions of voter records with personal identifying information, election databases, and supervisor passwords.

Additional web portal vulnerabilities in later years have repeatedly risked or briefly exposed personal voter data. Combined with ordinary internet security risks, the traceable ballot-level data that remains inside official systems cannot be treated as securely walled off from potential misuse.

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STUNNING NEW EVIDENCE Reveals 68 Cities Where Dem-Funded GBI Strategies Sent Over 104 Packages Filled With MI Voter Registrations…Muskegon Was Only Where They Were Caught

Top Michigan media outlets, like the Detroit News and Free Press have done a grave injustice to the country by enabling Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s efforts to bury one of the most thoroughly documented investigations into organized election fraud in recent American history. Not only did members of the media downplay the statewide probe into GBI Strategies—launched just one month before the November 2020 election in Michigan—but they made no serious effort to examine or expose the full scope of the scheme or the number of cities and municipalities whose elections may have been compromised by the injection of an unknown volume of fraudulent registrations onto Michigan’s voter rolls.

Prior to the 2020 election, Michigan clerks were furious with Jocelyn Benson for telling them to IGNORE signature matching on absentee envelopes, in violation of election law.  Not only was Jocelyn Benson breaking the law with her “guidance” to the clerks, but at the same time, she was hiding the largest investigation into voter registration fraud in the state’s history from the clerks tasked with ensuring the integrity of the election.

Although the report shows Ann Meisch contacted the Muskegon Police Department on October 16, 2020, we have evidence she appears to have known about the fraudulent voter registratons as early as October 5, when she shared an image on a private Michigan Clerk’s Facebook page we were given access to following our exclusive report on the GBI Strategies/Empower Michigan bombshell investigation.

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Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s Animal Farm – Pushes Globalist Flock Line…’It’s For Your Safety’

It’s always ‘for the children’, or ‘for your safety’, as they try and take away your Constitutional rights to install a tyrannical police state, full of corruption and decay. It’s now the Savannah hunger games.

We are all well aware of Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s refusal to deal with the homeless problem in Savannah, going so far as to defy state law.

It is increasingly obvious that Johnson is simply another globalist puppet installed to enact the globalist agenda of surveillance, high crime, and societal destruction.

Johnson’s comments on the Flock Safety cameras installed throughout the city are just the latest example of this reality.

“On one end you can’t say, you know, ‘Keep us safe, do everything that you can to keep us safe,’ and on the other hand say, ‘But wait, we don’t want these cameras,’” Johnson said. “We’ve got cameras outside, we’ve got cameras of people walking up and down the street, you have cameras when you go into the airport, you have cameras when you walk into the stores, I mean, you know, public safety comes at a cost.”

Excuse us Mayor Johnson, but public safety should not come via a violation of our Constitutional rights.

We have questions for the Mayor.

  • Did you ask the citizens of Savannah if it was ok with them if you installed surveillance cameras throughout the city to track their movement?
  • Have you disclosed to the citizens of Savannah the full extent of the capabilities of the cameras, including blue tooth, audio, and phone surveillance?

Enquiring minds want to know.

We at The Georgia Record think good old fashion police work, and not Minority Report is the way to keep the residents of Savannah safe.

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GrapheneOS Wipe at Airport Leads to Federal Charge in Atlanta

The Justice Department is asking a federal court in Atlanta to treat a man’s erasure of his own phone as destruction of property, in the first known US prosecution built on a phone’s duress password.

Samuel Tunick faces one count under Title 18, Section 2232(a), a statute covering the destruction of property to stop the government from taking it. Prosecutors say he handed Customs and Border Protection officers a passcode that deleted the contents of his Google Pixel instead of unlocking it. His lawyers appeared before the court for the first time on Monday, arguing that officers ran a custodial interrogation without Miranda warnings, denied him a lawyer, and searched him unlawfully. They want everything obtained from the encounter suppressed.

CBP pulled Tunick into secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson on January 24, 2025, as he returned from the Dominican Republic. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer and an FBI special agent had coordinated with CBP in advance to question and search him on arrival. The account comes from the defense filing, which draws on the government’s own reports. Officers from CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team opened by telling him they were “looking for people who are pedophiles.”

Officers never read Tunick his Miranda rights. He said early in the interview that he did not want to keep talking without a lawyer, then asked to call one repeatedly. Questioning continued. One officer told him his refusal to talk gave them authority to go through his phone. When he asked again about his attorney, an officer told him customs and immigration work was a different matter, “and we have search authority, we don’t need a warrant.”

Tunick eventually provided a password for his phone and his e-reader. The screen “went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart,” according to the government’s report. Officers seized the devices anyway and told him they would be returned after thirty days. A third officer took him to another room for a pat-down that was not recorded. A DHS agent then told him he was free to leave once the other agents were finished with him.

The government’s reports contain no indication that anyone suspected Tunick of carrying illegal images, his lawyers wrote. The reports record an interest in his association with Defend the Atlanta Forest, the movement opposing the clearing of the South River Forest for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Opponents call the 85-acre, $115 million police facility Cop City. Federal documents label the movement an “Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremist Group.” Tunick has not been charged with any offense connected to it.

Eleventh Circuit precedent favors the government. Its 2018 ruling in United States v. Touset permits forensic searches of electronic devices at the border with no warrant, no probable cause, and no individualized suspicion. Tunick’s lawyers cite decisions from the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits going the other way, including a Fourth Circuit holding that warrantless border searches of devices cannot be used to hunt for evidence of domestic crime. They also argue that surrendering a passcode is testimonial, relying on a 2012 Eleventh Circuit decision that decrypting and producing the contents of a hard drive triggers Fifth Amendment protection.

Courts allow suspicionless border searches to keep contraband out of the country. The accusation here is that data left a phone rather than entered the United States, and digital files move across borders over the internet anyway. A ruling on the motion is not expected before the end of October.

GrapheneOS, the hardened Android build that replaces the stock software on Pixel devices, lets an owner set a second PIN or password that irreversibly wipes the device and any installed eSIMs when entered at a credential prompt. No confirmation dialog appears, and nothing distinguishes it from a normal unlock.

Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Runa Sandvik, founder of the security firm Granitt, both said they had seen no comparable prosecution. Sandvik said she had discussed the scenario with activists and journalists for years and advised travelers to leave sensitive data off devices they carry across borders rather than count on wiping it. Christophe Boutry told the Guardian the prosecution “sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default.”

Matthew Dodge, an assistant federal public defender on Tunick’s legal team, said the statute is rarely seen in an indictment. Tunick was arrested about ten months after the airport stop. His crowdfunding page says he was pulled over for a purported tail light fault and cuffed by FBI and DHS officers when he stepped out of the car. He has pleaded not guilty. The single-count indictment  accuses him of acting to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel to impair the government’s lawful authority to take it, in violation of Title 18 of what the document calls the “Untied States Code.”

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Georgia Cops Keep Getting Arrested And Fired For Illegally Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People, But Surely Those 17 Bad Apples Aren’t Representative Of The Entire Bunch

“Another Georgia cop accused of misusing Flock data in growing trend,” the USA Today headline reads. If you remember now-former Braselton police chief Michael Steffman’s arrest on stalking charges last year, it would be understandable if you assumed CBS News meant a second Georgia officer had been arrested for misusing Flock’s license plate data to stalk their victims. There couldn’t be that many bad cops getting arrested in one state, right? Well, that depends on whether your definition of “not that many” because USA Today reports that at least 17 Georgia cops have been accused of Flock-stalking in just the last couple of months. 

Former Sergeant Kabiru Salawu lost the job he’d held with the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office since 2009, after he was arrested over allegations that he engaged in “unauthorized use of the agency’s Flock Safety technology.” Salawu currently faces a felony charge for violating his oath of office, but in Georgia, misuse of license plate data is charged as a misdemeanor. For now, the sheriff’s office hasn’t released any information on how it caught Salawu, nor have they explained what he’s accused of using Flock’s system to do.

According to CBS News, Salawu’s arrest brings the total number of law enforcement officers accused of abusing their access to the private surveillance system that tracks everyone everywhere all the time, even if you don’t drive a car or have a license plate visible, to 10 “in recent weeks.” Not months or years. Weeks. As internal audits continue, don’t be surprised to see those numbers rise in the coming weeks, either. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, and if internal audits turned up enough evidence to charge 17 officers over the last several months, it stands to reason that ongoing investigations will turn up evidence of even more abuses within the Georgia law enforcement community.

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Ga. police supervisor arrested after Flock audit, department says

Yet another metro Atlanta law enforcement member has been arrested for allegedly misusing the department’s Flock license plate reader system.

Paige Forte, a 30-year-old supervisor with the Conyers Police Department’s Real-Time Crime Center, allegedly used the system to search for her domestic partner’s car several times. The searches were flagged during an audit, according to police.

Rockdale County Jail records show Forte was arrested on Wednesday and charged with prohibited use of law enforcement-retained license plate data. The police department asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to complete its own criminal investigation.

In its own statement, the GBI said Forte allegedly accessed the system “for non-law enforcement purposes” more than 30 times between April and July this year.

Forte has been put on administrative leave following the outcome of the police department’s internal investigation.

“The integrity of our department depends on the public’s confidence that we use technology responsibly and within the law,” Conyers Police Chief Scott Freeman said in a statement. “No employee is above the law, and we will continue to hold ourselves to the highest standards of accountability.”

Several law enforcement officers in Georgia — including three Fayetteville police officers, three Cherokee County deputies, one DeKalb County deputy and one Greene County deputy — have recently been disciplined for allegedly using their departments’ Flock systems outside of official law enforcement activity.

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REPORT: Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia Spends More on Makeup Than AOC and Rashida Tlaib

Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is apparently very concerned about his appearance and wants to appear as dainty as possible because according to a new report from the Washington Free Beacon, he spends more on makeup than some members of the Squad.

We’re not here to judge Senator Ossoff. Most Democrats want to look their best when they’re playing for the cameras of their fans in the media.

One has to wonder what his nighttime routine is like for skin moisturizer. Do you think he wears a mask?

From the Washington Free Beacon:

Jon Ossoff Spends Thousands on ‘Makeup Services’ From Artist Who Worked on Hollywood Blockbusters Like ‘The Notebook’

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.) has spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on “makeup services” in 2026, and his artist of choice has a long list of Hollywood credits, including The Notebook and The Hunger Games, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

Ossoff has paid makeup artist Stephanie Ponder $2,887 for “makeup services” since February, federal campaign finance disclosures show. The most recent payment of $900 came on June 10. An advertisement on the online production crew directory SHOOTS describes Ponder as an Atlanta-based freelancer and member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees who offers “Services for all phases of Makeup: Film, Video, Print, Runway.” It also includes credits on films like the Disney-produced Denzel Washington hit Remember the Titans…

Ossoff’s four-figure makeup expenditures stand out among federal candidates. The Georgia senator who is running for reelection against Republican Rep. Mike Collins (Ga.), has reported spending more on makeup than any other candidate this year, beating out the likes of far-left Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.). Ocasio-Cortez has spent $1,837.93 on “campaign event hair & makeup services” in 2026, while Tlaib has spent $320 on “hair and makeup services.”

The spending also comes as liberal media figures praise the 39-year-old Ossoff’s carefully managed on-camera presence and float him as a prospective 2028 presidential candidate.

How nice for him.

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Bureaucratic NIGHTMARE – Marietta, GA Woman Mistakenly Declared Dead By Medicare, Left Without Coverage

In mid-June, WSB-TV news (Atlanta) reported that an elderly woman was mistakenly declared dead by Medicare and left without coverage!

Wrong, Medicare. She was very much alive and interviewed by the Atlanta media outlet.

The TV news presenters introduced the segment: “An 88-year-old Cobb County woman should be recovering right now in a rehab facility, after a hospital stay for heart problems. But instead her Medicare coverage has been cancelled because Medicare thinks she’s DEAD.”

The result was that she couldn’t get the care she needed right then.

The TV news reporter said that someone typed “deceased” into her medical records instead of “discharged”.

Her daughter said the results since have been “an avalanche of chaos”.

“I am alive, very much,” the 88-year-old woman told WSB-TV news.

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FBI Fires Husband and Wife Analysts Who Refused to Assist Georgia 2020 Election Investigation

The FBI has reportedly fired two intelligence analysts after they refused to participate in the bureau’s investigation into Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.

According to multiple reports, the Atlanta-based analysts, a husband and wife, told colleagues they did not believe the investigation was justified and declined to work on the case.

They were reportedly escorted from the FBI office after refusing the assignment.

The FBI did not confirm the firings but defended its decision.

“The FBI will always investigate credible allegations of matters related to federal elections,” an FBI spokesperson said.

“Every employee at this FBI is to uphold our mission and adhere to our standards, any deviation will not be tolerated.”

Earlier this month, the FBI assigned 260 investigative analysts to assist with its ongoing investigation into the fraud that took place in Fulton County, Georgia, during the 2020 presidential election.

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