> Victory! Tenth Circuit Finds Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Support Broad Search of Protesters’ Devices and Digital Data
a phrase that should be impossible but due to wild corruption of the people who write law, it does
all of Florida, all of Maine are in a "ha what constitution" zone
https://www.aclumaine.org/know-your-rights/100-mile-border-z...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/bill-rights-border-fou...
That's an insane overreaction and overreach. There's some quotes from officers during the protests that are particularly troubling, too.
The article links directly to the ruling: https://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/sites/ca10/files/opinions/0101...
I wonder how the Sargent and Judge who approved these searches feel. If they take their jobs seriously, I do hope that they are more critical of search warrant applications in the future.
I hope that as a society we are starting to learn, and protect, the value of, and right to, privacy.
I guarantee they feel like they've been slighted because they take their jobs seriously, and from their perspective they should have been allowed to do what they did. Power corrupts the mind as much as the bank account.
I doubt anyone else will learn the lesson without something similar happening. Even some Germans are forgetting it already.
The question is whether they'll learn in time to do anything about it.
I wish... but nope... see CA's and CO's requirements that OSs check ID
People can say whatever they want to journalists, but they say different things to the politicians. Standing up for privacy does not get you elected and so we will continue to get anti-privacy laws and Attorneys General who won't enforce what we do have.
The best you can hope for is a judge deciding how they want the Constitution to read, and that's far from the slam dunk you'd expect.
Among other factors, boomers grew up in a time where it wasn't unusual to announce your home address during a televised interview. Their ideas of privacy and locality is so fundamentally different from a generation that was the test bed for factors like cyberbullying, doxxing, mass trolling/harassment for users all around the world.
And you know, spending your 30's/40's seeing blatant government overreach to harrass minorities and political opponents will help. Doubly so for Gen Z seeing this in their early adult years.
These are the post-facto rationalizations voters cite to explain or defend their vote. But the actual decision is made much earlier than voting time, and it’s one driven primarily by emotion and social influence. The “issues” are a convenient alignment mechanism but not the primary motivator.
This should be obvious by the fact voters must choose between two viable candidates – the choice has been made for them, long before they get the luxury of sorting through which issues are most important to their vote.
“Wish I could be there. I’d kill for such an opportunity. All the best and see you next time.”
~ Cardinal Richelieu (Cardinal and former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of France)
Cops often hate the people. They see the people as their enemies. Retaliation is commonplace. Their goal is to arrest people, not actually achieve peace and justice. DAs and judges are often similar. We've seen cases where highly respected DAs have continued to prosecute people they knew were innocent.
This sort of thing is not a case of particular cops or DAs or judges not taking their job seriously. This is cops or DAs or judges thinking that they have a totally different job than they really should have.
We've had a significant breakdown in process here. Congress is deadlocked. The Supreme Court is corrupt. The only thing left are The People (protest / vote < civil disobedience < escalation beyond).
They all act like it's the most insulting thing in the world that they get pulled over. They all use their status as cops to try and get out of the ticket. The cops that pull them over always treat them in the softest and most deferential way imaginable. And I'm sure more times than there are videos for, these cops get away with DUI which is why they are so incensed when the arresting cop doesn't play along.
It'd be much nicer if privacy was one of those mainstream topics. But that's not the case thus far. It's mostly propped into legislature by smaller organizations.
One of the rules is that it's damn near impossible to amend the rules. It hasn't been done in a half century. (Setting aside one oddball originally written by those rich white guys but left in a drawer by accident.)
It has to be a criminal thing because the top brass and civil servants need RICO like prosecution and tossed in jail along with the guy who gets the insurance ding.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
This page:
https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2025/jul/1/understand...
Is one of the few that includes international airports, but then they go on to use the "200 million Americans within 100 miles of a border" statistic that's only accurate if you're only counting the land, sea, and Great Lakes borders. Which is still insane.
If you add a 100 mile circle around every international airport, that's basically every major population center in the country.
Sounds like yet another absurd misrepresentation, let's see if anyone can call them on it.
Mind you, this data only represents the state of Utah's electronic "e-Warrant" system. It would not surprise me is results were not too different across other states.
[1] https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-138/unwarranted-warra...
The indicted cops responded to an off-duty cop's DUI crash. They texted each other on their personal phones so as not to create a record. They positioned their bodycams so as not to capture the incident. At one point, one of the cops held the other's to make it look as if he was still standing there while he secretly called their supervisor. They then let the drunk cop drive away. Hours later, another officer found the car parked on the sidewalk. That officer did finally arrest him.
"These police officers did their job. We should not be here today," said union president Patrick Hendry, who accused the DA of targeting the officers. "He needs to support officers instead of going after them. Enough is enough."
To their credit, these charges came based on a referral from NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, though it was 4 years later.
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/nyregion/nypd-dui-coverup...
And then hilariously people would say that this is just evidence that the warrants are all written extremely carefully and conservatively.
That's the thing, with how much cops will put on the kids gloves if it's an officer I'm certain the hope isn't small that they'll get out of it. The videos you see of cops getting arrested they are almost always completely blasted.
But that doesn't change the fact that the government isn't going to stop itself from overstepping the constitution, that duty falls with the people via protest, voting, lawsuits, and as a last resort, use of force.
Reality, is disappointing. Where we have a dealocked congress we try to switch around every 2 years while 9 people in the courts can re-interpret how they wish with basically zero reprecussions, for life.
Maybe the SCOTUS also needs terms limits thanks to modern medical advances. I don't think the founding fathers intended for courts to remain the same people for decades on end. It can be a very long term like the Federal Reserve, but we definitely need something.
In a big win for protesters’ rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data.
The case, Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs, arose after a housing protest in 2021, during which Colorado Springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway. After the demonstration, police also obtained warrants to seize and search through the devices and data of Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest. The warrants included a search through all of her photos, videos, emails, text messages, and location data over a two-month period, as well as a time-unlimited search for 26 keywords, including words as broad as “bike,” “assault,” “celebration,” and “right,” that allowed police to comb through years of Armendariz’s private and sensitive data—all supposedly to look for evidence related to the alleged simple assault. Police further obtained a warrant to search the Facebook page of the Chinook Center, the organization that spearheaded the protest, despite the Chinook Center never having been accused of a crime.
The district court dismissed the civil rights lawsuit brought by Armendariz and the Chinook Center, holding that the searches were justified and that, in any case, the officers were entitled to qualified immunity. The plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU of Colorado, appealed. EFF—joined by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University—wrote an amicus brief in support of that appeal.
In a 2-1 opinion, the Tenth Circuit reversed the district court’s dismissal of the lawsuit’s Fourth Amendment search and seizure claims. The court painstakingly picked apart each of the three warrants and found them to be overbroad and lacking in particularity as to the scope and duration of the searches. The court further held that in furnishing such facially deficient warrants, the officers violated “clearly established” law and thus were not entitled to qualified immunity. Although the court did not explicitly address the First Amendment concerns raised by the lawsuit, it did note the backdrop against how these searches were carried out, including animus by Colorado Springs police leading up to the housing protest.
It is rare for appellate courts to call into question any search warrants. It’s even rarer for them to deny qualified immunity defenses. The Tenth Circuit’s decision should be celebrated as a big win for protesters and anyone concerned about police immunity for violating people’s constitutional rights. The case is now remanded back to the district court to proceed—and hopefully further vindicate the privacy rights we all have in our devices and digital data.
Which is another way of saying the defense's wealth.
Americans generally think vandalism is wrong, but also that the Boston Tea Party was a good thing - yadda yadda yadda...
I've also thrown around ideas in my head of state SC's chief justices having a channel to court marshal a SCOTUS and eject them with a supermajority ruling. Or a band of federal judges. But there's so much more involved there I haven't begun to consider.