AT FIRST, Steven Saari said, federal immigration agents seemed to think he was one of them.
Saari, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, went to the scene of Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis less than an hour after federal agents fired the fatal shots. He was wearing his Marine camouflage and carrying a lawfully owned 9mm Glock handgun on his right hip, as he does every day, he told The Intercept. Agents on the scene “thought I was undercover,” Saari said. “They kept asking what agency I was with.”
When Saari told them he was not with any agency, their demeanor shifted. Federal immigration agents soon aimed M4-style rifles at his head, footage reviewed by The Intercept shows, their fingers on the trigger less than a minute’s walk away from where Pretti was killed.
“More and more Border Patrol and ICE agents gathered around me,” Saari said. “Then they moved in with rifles and handguns drawn.”
The encounter raises questions about how federal agents assessed threats, used force, and made arrest decisions in the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s killing. In Saari’s case, he and his attorney told The Intercept, federal agents took scans and samples of his biometric data and made a copy of his phone — without obtaining a warrant.
Always put your phone on lock down mode if the Nazis are nearby. If it ends up in their possession, do a remote wipe.
GrapheneOS is the way to go. It’s hardware limited to Google Pixel phones, but it is the most secure, privacy-oriented OS available to consumers. Yes, you’re using google hardware, but Graphene sandboxes all apps, de-googles the experience by default, and even if you choose to use some google apps it sandboxes them to limit the data they can pull from you.
And you can set up a pin code which, when entered on the unlock screen, erases the device instead of unlocking it.
Does seem like he could’ve done much here. They took it and cloned it without even asking him to unlock it. Doubt they gave him much of an opportunity to wipe it before doing that, and wiping the original once they have a copy doesn’t accomplish anything.
An alternative approach is having a dedicated burner phone for filming them. No personal information, no need to lock, and filled to the brim with butthole pictures.