Samuel Tunick's phone wiped itself at an airport. The bill arrived from his university
He gave border agents a code. The phone erased itself instead of unlocking. Twenty months later, six hours before his first class as a teaching assistant, an automated email told him he had failed a background check.
Samuel Tunick was flying home to the U.S. after a vacation in the Dominican Republic in January 2025. Agents asked to search his bags and pat him down; he refused. They searched anyway and, his lawyer Matthew Dodge says, found nothing improper. Then they asked for his phone. Tunick handed over a code. An officer typed it in, and instead of unlocking, the screen went blank and showed the logo of GrapheneOS — a privacy-focused version of Android whose "duress password" feature erases the device for good.
That erasure is now a criminal charge he has pleaded not guilty to. And this month it cost him something that has nothing to do with courts: Georgia State University pulled the job it had already offered him. He was due to start as a teaching assistant on August 25. Six hours before his first lab, an automated email said he had not passed the required background check. The teaching job came with wages and a tuition waiver for a master's in geosciences. Both vanished in the same email.
Here is the part that should interest anyone who has ever ticked a box on a hiring form. According to emails Tunick shared, his department head was told the "Background Check Committee" denied the hire, the Dean of Students denied it, and the legal department denied it too. When she asked which policy this was based on, she was told there actually aren't any. Each hire, the university said, gets a risk assessment case by case.
So three separate offices said no, and nobody could point to a rule. Tunick's own reading: "a subjective, and essentially arbitrary decision made for reasons that have not been made clear to me or other faculty." Georgia State did not respond to a request for comment, so we do not know what tipped the decision — the pending charge, the publicity, or something else entirely.
A charge you have not been convicted of can still take your salary.
That is the mechanism worth understanding. The court case is about whether refusing to open your phone at a border can become a crime when the data disappears. The employment case is about something quieter and faster: a background check is not a verdict, but employers treat it like one. Tunick has been through this before — he says he failed a check for a job on a Christmas tree lot, and when he asked Atlanta Public Schools about it, he was pointed to the FBI.
Anyone who applies for a job that runs a background check — which now includes campus work, delivery gigs, anything involving a school or a kid. If you are 22 and your first real paycheck depends on a committee you will never meet, this is the story of how that committee can say no without naming a rule. It also touches everyone who travels with a phone: Tunick had a full life on that device, and he found out before the airport that a tracker had been placed on his car and that his cellphone records and Gmail data had been subpoenaed. And it touches students specifically — his tuition waiver went away with the job, so one charge took both his income and his degree plan in a single email.
Tunick and his supporters delivered a demand letter asking Georgia State to reinstate his employment and/or the tuition waiver, explain the hiring and background review process, and apply an "innocent until proven guilty" standard to hiring. Watch for whether the university answers any of those three, or keeps not responding. On the criminal side, he has pleaded not guilty — no hearing date is named in the reporting, so what happens next in court, nobody has said publicly.
The phone did exactly what its owner installed it to do. The software worked; the consequences landed on the human. Tunick's summary of the last two years is worth reading twice: authorities "really just tried to dig up anything they could on me" and came up empty — and he still lost the job. Which raises an uncomfortable question about privacy tools: what good is a feature that protects your data perfectly if the cost of using it is your income?
Sources: 404 Media, "University Rescinds Job Offer to Activist Who Allegedly Wiped Phone Before DHS Could Search It," Joseph Cox, Sep 17, 2026
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