> 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.
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.
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.
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 grant 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).
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.
Eh? They can, but it makes any cases based on evidence gathered from the declared unconstitutional searches basically dead and easily tossed in courts.
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 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.
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.
> 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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
I hope that as a society we are starting to learn, and protect, the value of, and right to, privacy.
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.
I doubt anyone else will learn the lesson without something similar happening. Even some Germans are forgetting it already.
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.
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).