> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Cops often have the view that if they weren't allowed to be special and do things that are crimes for others, then society would collapse in a huge bloodbath. They tend to believe they are the 'thin blue line' between civilisation and barbarism, the front in a war against the unbridled animalism of the uncouth masses.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
Before that we need a vast overhaul of qualified immunity for state officials and expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials. It is incredibly difficult to sue state officials for violating your rights because of how qualified immunity works and Bivens is even weaker when it comes to suing federal officials.
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.
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).
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.
19 replies →
I doubt it, judges don't read warrant applications.
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)
5 replies →
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...
2 replies →
> 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.
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.
Cops often have the view that if they weren't allowed to be special and do things that are crimes for others, then society would collapse in a huge bloodbath. They tend to believe they are the 'thin blue line' between civilisation and barbarism, the front in a war against the unbridled animalism of the uncouth masses.
2 replies →
> If they take their jobs seriously
There's about 0% that's true. Judges and even police are politicians now.
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.
[dead]
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.
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...
They probably won't because they don't want a nationwide precedent if it's upheld by SCOTUS.
"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
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?
3 replies →
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.
2 replies →
If faith in the fairness and belief in the protection of the rule of law collapses much further, I suspect people will learn.
The question is whether they'll learn in time to do anything about it.
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
[dead]
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.
10 replies →
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?
1 reply →
Before that we need a vast overhaul of qualified immunity for state officials and expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials. It is incredibly difficult to sue state officials for violating your rights because of how qualified immunity works and Bivens is even weaker when it comes to suing federal officials.
1 reply →
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.
That’s cool but I just have a feeling that the Supreme Court will be like hold my beer and poof 4th DOES support this.
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.
11 replies →
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).
4 replies →
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.
[dead]
[dead]