8 ms·

Court finds Fourth Amendment doesn’t support broad search of protesters’ devices

640 points by hn_acker 8mo ago

hn_acker 8mo ago
The original title is: > Victory! Tenth Circuit Finds Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Support Broad Search of Protesters’ Devices and Digital Data
shablulman 8mo ago
[flagged]
mothballed 8mo ago
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.
- patrickmay 8mo ago
  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.
  - sneak 8mo ago
    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?
    - Zigurd 8mo ago
      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.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    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.
    - mothballed 8mo ago
      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.
      - lazide 8mo ago
        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.
    - JoshTriplett 8mo ago
      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.
      - pinkmuffinere 8mo ago
        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.
        noosphr 8mo ago
        Police have unions.
  - UncleMeat 8mo ago
    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.
    - hn_acker 8mo ago
      > expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials I don't expect Congress to do so in the foreseeable future (regardless of how the 2026 midterms go), but I hope more states will adopt "converse 1983" laws [1]. [1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-state-law-remedy-constitutional-violations-by-federal-officers https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-state-law-remedy-co...
- jimt1234 8mo ago
  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.
  - curt15 8mo ago
    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.
jmward01 8mo ago
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.
- sneak 8mo ago
  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.
- black_13 8mo ago
  [dead]
- jfengel 8mo ago
  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.
  - Propelloni 8mo ago
    Then how did we get the laws we have now? How did we get the constitution and the amendments?
    - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
      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.
JohnTHaller 8mo ago
The Republican administration will ignore this court order as well
- RajT88 8mo ago
  Indeed. Who holds the government accountable to its own laws?
  - garciasn 8mo ago
    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).
    - lemoncucumber 8mo ago
      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.
      - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
        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.
        rnxrx 8mo ago
        How about we just start with SCOTUS having transparent (and enforced) ethics and corruption policies?
fusslo 8mo ago
> 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/010111390292.pdf 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.
- stronglikedan 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - cogman10 8mo ago
    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.
    - bitexploder 8mo ago
      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.
ck2 8mo ago
"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-zone/ https://www.aclumaine.org/know-your-rights/100-mile-border-z... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/bill-rights-border-fourth-amendment-limits-searching-your-data-and-devices https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/bill-rights-border-fou... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
This is in Colorado Springs. What about the 100 mile border zone where the federal government pretends all rights are suspended?
- antonvs 8mo ago
  The current government believes in some sort of transitive property of 100 mile border zones. Mathematics hasn't quite caught up with this yet.
- howardYouGood 8mo ago
  [dead]
- SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago
  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.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    That's correct, the zone is also 100 miles around every international airport.
  - LeifCarrotson 8mo ago
    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://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception This page: https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2025/jul/1/understanding-your-constitutional-rights-100-mile-border-zone-primer-non-citizens-united-states-when-confronted-law-enforcement/ 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.
jandrese 8mo ago
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.
- nickff 8mo ago
  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-highest-reversal-rate/ https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/02/which-circuit-had-the-h...
- stvltvs 8mo ago
  They probably won't because they don't want a nationwide precedent if it's upheld by SCOTUS.
shevy-java 8mo ago
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?
Helloyello 8mo ago
[dead]
nizbit 8mo ago
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.

640 points by hn_acker 8mo ago

The original title is: > Victory! Tenth Circuit Finds Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Support Broad Search of Protesters’ Devices and Digital Data

shablulman 8mo ago

[flagged]

mothballed 8mo ago

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.

patrickmay 8mo ago
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.
- sneak 8mo ago
  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?
  - Zigurd 8mo ago
    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.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  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.
  - mothballed 8mo ago
    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.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      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.
  - JoshTriplett 8mo ago
    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.
    - pinkmuffinere 8mo ago
      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.
      - noosphr 8mo ago
        Police have unions.
- UncleMeat 8mo ago
  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.
  - hn_acker 8mo ago
    > expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials I don't expect Congress to do so in the foreseeable future (regardless of how the 2026 midterms go), but I hope more states will adopt "converse 1983" laws [1]. [1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-state-law-remedy-constitutional-violations-by-federal-officers https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-state-law-remedy-co...
jimt1234 8mo ago
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.
- curt15 8mo ago
  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.

jmward01 8mo ago

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.

sneak 8mo ago
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.
black_13 8mo ago
[dead]
jfengel 8mo ago
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.
- Propelloni 8mo ago
  Then how did we get the laws we have now? How did we get the constitution and the amendments?
  - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
    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.

JohnTHaller 8mo ago

The Republican administration will ignore this court order as well

RajT88 8mo ago
Indeed. Who holds the government accountable to its own laws?
- garciasn 8mo ago
  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).
  - lemoncucumber 8mo ago
    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.
    - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
      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.
      - rnxrx 8mo ago
        How about we just start with SCOTUS having transparent (and enforced) ethics and corruption policies?

fusslo 8mo ago

> 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/010111390292.pdf 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.

stronglikedan 8mo ago
> 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.
- cogman10 8mo ago
  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.
  - bitexploder 8mo ago
    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.

ck2 8mo ago

"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-zone/ https://www.aclumaine.org/know-your-rights/100-mile-border-z... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/bill-rights-border-fourth-amendment-limits-searching-your-data-and-devices https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/bill-rights-border-fou... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago

This is in Colorado Springs. What about the 100 mile border zone where the federal government pretends all rights are suspended?

antonvs 8mo ago
The current government believes in some sort of transitive property of 100 mile border zones. Mathematics hasn't quite caught up with this yet.
howardYouGood 8mo ago
[dead]
SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago
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.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  That's correct, the zone is also 100 miles around every international airport.
- LeifCarrotson 8mo ago
  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://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception This page: https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2025/jul/1/understanding-your-constitutional-rights-100-mile-border-zone-primer-non-citizens-united-states-when-confronted-law-enforcement/ 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.

jandrese 8mo ago

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.

nickff 8mo ago
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-highest-reversal-rate/ https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/02/which-circuit-had-the-h...
stvltvs 8mo ago
They probably won't because they don't want a nationwide precedent if it's upheld by SCOTUS.

shevy-java 8mo ago

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?

Helloyello 8mo ago

[dead]

nizbit 8mo ago

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.