This. A thousand times this. It's as if Opus can only communicate in a glib, software engineering vernacular that presumes domain-specific knowledge and uses jargon accordingly.
US v. Arnold was a Ninth Circuit ruling, and was later superseded in its own circuit by US. v Cotterman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Cotterman), which ruled that a "forensic" search does not fall within the scope of routine border inspection, and does require individual suspicion.
This was backed up with even more rulings like US v. Kolusz in the Fourth Circuit. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on this specific question, but has issued other general rulings about cell phone data, like Riley v. California, which determined that data on a cell phone is protected by the Fourth Amendment against warrantless search and seizure.
If the case in the article makes its way up to SCOTUS, it's not unreasonable to expect that the court will combine multiple districts' established precedent that "forensic searches" are not covered by any border exception with its own recent precedent protecting cell phone data, and rule that demanding unrestricted access to phone data without reasonable suspicion is unconstitutional.
The "Hardware" link indicates that the BoM specifies a "24-pin SPI e-paper for GoodDisplay panels (3.97″, 4.26″, 7.5″ and up)." A search turns up this: https://www.good-display.com/product/516.html
Yeah and if this were taken seriously, you would have Mechanical Turk style services where poors are paid pennies to hand-write submitted/generated slop, defeating the purpose.
They covered that situation with the pen plotter. There are signals of commitment that you can't fake. The article isn't saying anything about accuracy or authorship, only that you actually cared about what you were communicating enough to put in some self sacrifice, and that this is a useful signal to help decide if something is worth listening to.
I can't really think of a suitable one TBH; Python's completely out of the running, Java and C# have a lot of unnecessary (for this goal) boilerplate, Pascal is not a bad choice.
Maybe Javascript? The books can then instruct "type this into an HTML file".
In my mind, a more modern platform would be a simulated one that has its own machine language (byte-code compiled, perhaps) so that these books, which take you all the way into machine language, would make sense.