> 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.
That's an insane overreaction and overreach. There's some quotes from officers during the protests that are particularly troubling, too.
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 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 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.
Yup. To see this mentality on full display you just have to pull up videos of cops getting DUIs.
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.
I don't think this is particularly unique to cops. When you're trapped and cornered, you desperately resort to any possible approach to get out of it. Acting incredulous or indignant when you know you've messed up, with the small hope it will get you out of it, is a very common human thing.
The injury to their ego is tremendous. The ones that allow their authority to become their identity cannot mentally separate a challenge to this authority from a direct attack on themselves. To them it is quite literally the same thing and it is incredibly dangerous. It is how the authoritarian mind works, because to them it feels like survival.
Especially in the city of New York, I sincerely believe a police officer butting a reflective vest on the front dashboard of their illegally parked car is enough grounds for immediate dismissal/firing from the job and all retirement seized with no recourse. I don't know how we would make it legal but this is the kind of visible, petty corruption that makes people lose their respect for the system.
This apocryphal quote was a statement about his overwhelming power (strong enough to hang people who have done no wrong), not on the mutability of the law. It is frequently mis-applied.
The quote is indeed about the law being a nose of wax, to borrow an old English phrase, and how with sympathetic enough courts almost any decision could be upheld. But it's nothing new, precisely the same crime can yield drastically different judgements depending on e.g. the defensive attorney's experience.
If you think judges actually read warrants they sign, you’re very mistaken. Some judges are signing dozens of these a day in between other things on their docket.
"Ninety-eight percent of warrant reviews eventually result in an approval, and over 93% are approved on first submission. Further, we find that the median time for review is only three minutes, and that one out of every ten warrants is opened, reviewed, and approved in sixty seconds or less. [1]"
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.
Is this going to be appealed up to the Supreme Court? They are usually pretty eager to expand the power of qualified immunity so this judgement may be short lived.
So, this is not surprising in that many courts have found a similar result. That is, the amendments usually protect the freedoms; sometimes regular folks extend it to far (e. g. government having zero possibilities which is also not true - see Audit the Audit channel and others). But one thing that is interesting is that these public departments, be it cops or some civil institution (but usually police departments), still try it. The idea is that many people will comply rather than dare resist. I think this is an institutionalized level of abuse. A common person should expect these government representatives to KNOW the law. The only reason these representatives still try to it to go to court, is because they WANT to break the law. This should become illegal. It wastes time, money, resources, by public representatives. The court system should change; the assumption that everyone is a legal body, SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WHEN A GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE KNOWS THAT SOMETHING IS AGAINST THE LAW and they still try to go for a court proceeding. That is deliberate abuse. Why do taxpayers have to pay for that?
Denver International Airport has a customs zone (as all international airports do), and is only 86 miles from Colorado Springs. AFAIK they've never explicitly restricted their policy to land & sea borders.
Historically, they've considered land borders with Canada and Mexico, coastlines on the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway to be the edges of the 100 mile "reasonable distance":
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.
They may be the top stories, but they have never appeared on any list of voters' top concerns. It's always crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care.
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.
> crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care
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.
A bunch of rich white slave-owners wrote the rules over the space of a few months in Philadelphia.
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.)
By near definition, the lawmaking process mostly works on account of interested parties. There aren't a lot of issues that can get enough support merely by sheer mainstream pushback. That's why organizations spend time spreading awareness and lobbying (as well as coporate billionaire companies).
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.
I wonder if this will shift over the next decade as Millenials start to become the voting bloc to appeal to, a generation that grew up with the internet (or at worst, started picking up the internet late in college/early in the workforce)?
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.
Germans have mass surveillance and they are perhaps the most privacy-conscious society in the world, because of their (relatively recent) authoritarian catastrophe.
I doubt anyone else will learn the lesson without something similar happening. Even some Germans are forgetting it already.
It's an awesome victory. But until the penalty for violating rights under color of law is something real (like serious jail + restitution, barred from further public employment, etc) they will keep doing it.
A good start would be requiring police officers to carry individual liability insurance so that municipalities aren't paying for these lawsuits. If someone can't get insurance, they can no longer be a cop.
It's going to be cheaper for municipalites to have group insurance for this (or self-insure) than to have to pay the police enough that they can afford their own insurance.
The whole point of requiring individual insurance is precisely that insurance will be too expensive for people who are demonstrably high risk in that role, and less expensive for people who are low risk.
Some of the additional expense would be due to an individual risk profile, and some of the expense would be due to lack of bargaining power. The expense due to individual risk profile is a feature. The expense due to lack of bargaining power is not.
Ultimately it's the civil authorities and upper brass that want these intrusions. The insurance issue is easily worked around by hiring green recruits at a very high "bonus" to be used as basically burner employees to burn through their insurance and do the illegal stuff under their identity.
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.
It’s already a (very real) crime to do a Conspiracy to deprive someone of their civil rights, which is what you’re talking about. Occasionally someone gets sued under it, but it’s rare.
I don’t disagree, but can we really claim to have the rule of law if there is a class of people who can flagrantly violate criminal law and court orders and suffer zero criminal consequences?
Mayors, prosecutors, merchants, and local press get co-opted by police. This leads to systemic failures that, unfortunately, make dealing with this in criminal law less workable. Sometimes you gotta do what works.
Yes, an awesome victory. But I believe a tech solution is gonna be superior to any legal solution. Any data considered "private and sensitive" should be accessible only by the person who owns it. Full stop.
Tech solutions are toothless without laws to prevent authorities from detaining people indefinitely until they surrender access to their data. Efforts to prevent authoritarianism need to think more from the perspective of autocrats.
As a last resort when all other options have failed? Yeah, if you value democracy and don't want to bend the knee and live under an authoritarian state. Ammo box is listed last for a reason, of course, all other avenues should be pursued first.
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.
I'm not suggesting it, but taking a look at history, a couple notables are the Battle of Athens and Cliven Bundy standoff. Bundy is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Ammon Bundy has held relatively libertarian opinions on immigration for a long long time. Since at least the days of the standoffs. His political ideals are closer to the old time westy classical liberalism (something like founding era anti-federalists with a view of the law that essentially mirrors Bastiat) than they are to neo-conservatism.
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).
You’ve got the first two backwards. The real accountability mechanism in the constitution for a rogue president/administration is impeachment by congress (which is a proxy for the people in theory). Unfortunately neither enough of congress nor enough of the electorate cares if the administration breaks the law.
In theory, yes. Any supreme court interpretation can be overruled by a congress that is truly in lockstep.
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.
The issue lies in who enforces it. In theory, that's congress with the ability to impeach and convict members of SCOTUS.
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.
Eh? They can, but it makes any cases based on evidence gathered from the declared unconstitutional searches basically dead and easily tossed in courts.
> 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.
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 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 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.
Yup. To see this mentality on full display you just have to pull up videos of cops getting DUIs.
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.
I don't think this is particularly unique to cops. When you're trapped and cornered, you desperately resort to any possible approach to get out of it. Acting incredulous or indignant when you know you've messed up, with the small hope it will get you out of it, is a very common human thing.
The injury to their ego is tremendous. The ones that allow their authority to become their identity cannot mentally separate a challenge to this authority from a direct attack on themselves. To them it is quite literally the same thing and it is incredibly dangerous. It is how the authoritarian mind works, because to them it feels like survival.
Especially in the city of New York, I sincerely believe a police officer butting a reflective vest on the front dashboard of their illegally parked car is enough grounds for immediate dismissal/firing from the job and all retirement seized with no recourse. I don't know how we would make it legal but this is the kind of visible, petty corruption that makes people lose their respect for the system.
With enough data, you could appear guilty of almost anything.
> "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
~ Cardinal Richelieu (Cardinal and former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of France)
This apocryphal quote was a statement about his overwhelming power (strong enough to hang people who have done no wrong), not on the mutability of the law. It is frequently mis-applied.
Why would he need any lines then?
The quote is indeed about the law being a nose of wax, to borrow an old English phrase, and how with sympathetic enough courts almost any decision could be upheld. But it's nothing new, precisely the same crime can yield drastically different judgements depending on e.g. the defensive attorney's experience.
> e.g. the defensive attorney's experience.
Which is another way of saying the defense's wealth.
Particularly if you filter out the context when presenting the filtered data:
“Wish I could be there. I’d kill for such an opportunity. All the best and see you next time.”
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
"Show me the man, I'll show you the crime."
If you think judges actually read warrants they sign, you’re very mistaken. Some judges are signing dozens of these a day in between other things on their docket.
"Ninety-eight percent of warrant reviews eventually result in an approval, and over 93% are approved on first submission. Further, we find that the median time for review is only three minutes, and that one out of every ten warrants is opened, reviewed, and approved in sixty seconds or less. [1]"
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...
Is this going to be appealed up to the Supreme Court? They are usually pretty eager to expand the power of qualified immunity so this judgement may be short lived.
They probably won't because they don't want a nationwide precedent if it's upheld by SCOTUS.
Interestingly (at least to me), the Tenth Circuit doesn't get appealed very often, and holds up fairly well on appeal, with a 50% reversal rate on appeals that are heard. https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/02/which-circuit-had-the-h...
So, this is not surprising in that many courts have found a similar result. That is, the amendments usually protect the freedoms; sometimes regular folks extend it to far (e. g. government having zero possibilities which is also not true - see Audit the Audit channel and others). But one thing that is interesting is that these public departments, be it cops or some civil institution (but usually police departments), still try it. The idea is that many people will comply rather than dare resist. I think this is an institutionalized level of abuse. A common person should expect these government representatives to KNOW the law. The only reason these representatives still try to it to go to court, is because they WANT to break the law. This should become illegal. It wastes time, money, resources, by public representatives. The court system should change; the assumption that everyone is a legal body, SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WHEN A GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE KNOWS THAT SOMETHING IS AGAINST THE LAW and they still try to go for a court proceeding. That is deliberate abuse. Why do taxpayers have to pay for that?
The original title is:
> Victory! Tenth Circuit Finds Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Support Broad Search of Protesters’ Devices and Digital Data
This is in Colorado Springs. What about the 100 mile border zone where the federal government pretends all rights are suspended?
Denver International Airport has a customs zone (as all international airports do), and is only 86 miles from Colorado Springs. AFAIK they've never explicitly restricted their policy to land & sea borders.
Historically, they've considered land borders with Canada and Mexico, coastlines on the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway to be the edges of the 100 mile "reasonable distance":
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.
That's correct, the zone is also 100 miles around every international airport.
Having lived (or maybe more accurately "resided") in the Springs for a few years, this story didn't surprise me at all.
The current government believes in some sort of transitive property of 100 mile border zones. Mathematics hasn't quite caught up with this yet.
I think the top (tech) stories of the decade are likely: Privacy, AI and the energy transition.
I hope that as a society we are starting to learn, and protect, the value of, and right to, privacy.
They may be the top stories, but they have never appeared on any list of voters' top concerns. It's always crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care.
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.
> crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care
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.
Then how did we get the laws we have now? How did we get the constitution and the amendments?
A bunch of rich white slave-owners wrote the rules over the space of a few months in Philadelphia.
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.)
By near definition, the lawmaking process mostly works on account of interested parties. There aren't a lot of issues that can get enough support merely by sheer mainstream pushback. That's why organizations spend time spreading awareness and lobbying (as well as coporate billionaire companies).
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.
I wonder if this will shift over the next decade as Millenials start to become the voting bloc to appeal to, a generation that grew up with the internet (or at worst, started picking up the internet late in college/early in the workforce)?
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.
Germans have mass surveillance and they are perhaps the most privacy-conscious society in the world, because of their (relatively recent) authoritarian catastrophe.
I doubt anyone else will learn the lesson without something similar happening. Even some Germans are forgetting it already.
> I hope that as a society we are starting to learn, and protect, the value of, and right to, privacy.
I wish... but nope... see CA's and CO's requirements that OSs check ID
"constitution-free zone"
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
It's an awesome victory. But until the penalty for violating rights under color of law is something real (like serious jail + restitution, barred from further public employment, etc) they will keep doing it.
A good start would be requiring police officers to carry individual liability insurance so that municipalities aren't paying for these lawsuits. If someone can't get insurance, they can no longer be a cop.
It's going to be cheaper for municipalites to have group insurance for this (or self-insure) than to have to pay the police enough that they can afford their own insurance.
The whole point of requiring individual insurance is precisely that insurance will be too expensive for people who are demonstrably high risk in that role, and less expensive for people who are low risk.
Some of the additional expense would be due to an individual risk profile, and some of the expense would be due to lack of bargaining power. The expense due to individual risk profile is a feature. The expense due to lack of bargaining power is not.
Police have unions.
Then the department can pay for each officer's insurance.
If it's uninsurable in the private market, that's a hint. Maybe they could pledge the pension fund.
Ultimately it's the civil authorities and upper brass that want these intrusions. The insurance issue is easily worked around by hiring green recruits at a very high "bonus" to be used as basically burner employees to burn through their insurance and do the illegal stuff under their identity.
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.
It’s already a (very real) crime to do a Conspiracy to deprive someone of their civil rights, which is what you’re talking about. Occasionally someone gets sued under it, but it’s rare.
I don’t disagree, but can we really claim to have the rule of law if there is a class of people who can flagrantly violate criminal law and court orders and suffer zero criminal consequences?
Mayors, prosecutors, merchants, and local press get co-opted by police. This leads to systemic failures that, unfortunately, make dealing with this in criminal law less workable. Sometimes you gotta do what works.
Yes, an awesome victory. But I believe a tech solution is gonna be superior to any legal solution. Any data considered "private and sensitive" should be accessible only by the person who owns it. Full stop.
Tech solutions are toothless without laws to prevent authorities from detaining people indefinitely until they surrender access to their data. Efforts to prevent authoritarianism need to think more from the perspective of autocrats.
The Republican administration will ignore this court order as well
The case was filed in 2023.
Indeed. Who holds the government accountable to its own laws?
The people, using the 4 boxes of liberty: Soap Box, Ballot Box, Jury Box, and lastly, the Ammo box.
Are you suggesting people take up arms against police? Has that ever gone well for anyone, except as a quick way to die?
As a last resort when all other options have failed? Yeah, if you value democracy and don't want to bend the knee and live under an authoritarian state. Ammo box is listed last for a reason, of course, all other avenues should be pursued first.
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.
I'm not suggesting it, but taking a look at history, a couple notables are the Battle of Athens and Cliven Bundy standoff. Bundy is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Recent article on the younger Bundy, "Ammon Bundy Is All Alone. The anti-government militia leader can’t make sense of his allies’ support for ICE violence." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/ammon-bundy-trump-...
Ammon Bundy has held relatively libertarian opinions on immigration for a long long time. Since at least the days of the standoffs. His political ideals are closer to the old time westy classical liberalism (something like founding era anti-federalists with a view of the law that essentially mirrors Bastiat) than they are to neo-conservatism.
Well, the other option is to live while bending the knee. Who needs rights anyway??
Congress < Supreme Court < The People
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).
You’ve got the first two backwards. The real accountability mechanism in the constitution for a rogue president/administration is impeachment by congress (which is a proxy for the people in theory). Unfortunately neither enough of congress nor enough of the electorate cares if the administration breaks the law.
In theory, yes. Any supreme court interpretation can be overruled by a congress that is truly in lockstep.
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.
How about we just start with SCOTUS having transparent (and enforced) ethics and corruption policies?
The issue lies in who enforces it. In theory, that's congress with the ability to impeach and convict members of SCOTUS.
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.
Eh? They can, but it makes any cases based on evidence gathered from the declared unconstitutional searches basically dead and easily tossed in courts.
I don't know if that applies if you get a Trump judge.