> 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.
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.
I think the point is it's not the parking infraction: it's the attempt to get out of it by signaling that they are a police officer. I agree that kind of thing should be taken more seriously than the small offense it's trying to avoid (though maybe not quite so severely).
I don't know, it depends on context and intent, like nearly all things. But this is put aside because most on HN immediately go: police == bad.
If the cop is illegally parked to get lunch, sure ticket them, and/or report them for discipline.
If the cop is attending an incident and that is the only place to park within a reasonable distance, then that's fine.
However the suggestion that irrespective of context and intent, and even for the first contrived example, the cop should lose their job and pension... Ridiculous.
You have clearly missed the point of my comment, I assume on purpose given the first sentence. The second sentence was clearly not serious, and was sarcasm, not some confirmation of "privilege mentality".
Just last week, two NYPD cops were indicted for evidence tampering for doing exactly that.
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.
I've always treated most of those kind of videos as staged. I like the idea that that's how it goes down but, almost because it's cathartic, I don't trust that it's real footage, as opposed to, essentially, short film fiction.
> The cops that pull them over always treat them in the softest and most deferential way imaginable.
Without denying I have seen preferential treatment first-hand, you might take a step back and imagine...
You're dealing with someone who entered a career known for its machismo, where they received training on how to use physical violence, including training on shooting a weapon that could quite possibly be with them. This person has been drinking or is flat-out drunk, and it's only a matter of minutes before they realize how screwed they're about to be.
Treating them softly is what you SHOULD do.
We should be asking whether we are content to find ourselves in a world where that soft approach is considered the noteworthy exception.
What's stupid about using a soft approach, instead of a violent approach, to take away a driver's license from a drunk driver?
Why do police so frequently resort to violence that you're probably not surprised to hear bystanders in NYC were shot by cops pursuing a subway turnstile hopper? Let the implications of that sink in for a moment.
Why have I heard so many times about people losing their life after being pulled over for speeding?
> What's stupid about using a soft approach, instead of a violent approach
The options aren't soft vs violent.
The problem with the soft approach is it's all about giving the suspected impaired drive more chances to prove they aren't impaired. It's about avoiding removing them from the road, not avoiding a violent confrontation.
While cops shouldn't be dicks to everyone and they should always work to de-escalate, what they shouldn't do is let someone they think is impaired drive off. And that's what the "soft" approach is all about. It's about letting the arresting officer make excuses like "well, they don't seem THAT drunk" or "Well, they seem a little buzzed, but not that bad."
For a regular citizen, the cops would do a field sobriety test, a breathalyzer blow, and then arrest if it comes back high. That's what they should do for everyone they suspect is impaired.
If we wanted to argue for a softer approach, then I could see removing the criminal aspects of a DUI and instead just focusing on getting that person off the road and potentially revoking their license. But in no case should a cop let someone drive off that they suspect isn't fully sober.
> [Letting someone they think is impaired drive off is] what the "soft" approach is all about. [...] But in no case should a cop let someone drive off that they suspect isn't fully sober.
You are reading more into the vague "softly" term than is present in this thread, instead of "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The options aren't soft vs violent.
That there is a spectrum instead of a binary choice is what I discussed, though maybe it's a regional language quirk: "What's stupid about using a soft[er] approach, instead of a [more] violent approach..."
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.
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.
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.
> FISA warrants were even more incredible, with well below 1% rejection rates.
That's potentially much less incredible, and in any case not directly comparable, because its the final, not on-first-submission, rate, and also doesn't count applications withdrawn after a preliminary rejection that allows modificaitons but before a final ruling. It only counts the share of those that get a final ruling where that is an approval.
> 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.
I have been told, by a cop, that the exclusionary rule should be eliminated. This is the thing that says that evidence obtained in violation of the 4th amendment cannot be used against you in court. Their argument was that the cops know who the bad guys are and should just be allowed to throw them in prison. End of story.
The stupidity of this is that cops literally used to not exist. People used to have to arrest people themselves and drag them to a magistrate and then prosecute them themselves. Didn't mean society was mad max.
Doubt you'll find many cops who'll know that though.
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.
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.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with how bargaining works, but you only get the price break if you can come in as a large unified group. Having millions of individuals doesn’t result in a price break. Eg There are millions of private individuals buying health insurance in the US, but they have no bargaining power unless they purchase as a unified block. Individual health insurance policies are notoriously expensive.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also the groups that profit of your lack of privacy will heavily lobby/advertise against it using every fear based tactic they can. "Terrorists, child molesters, communists, Trans Mexican aliens from Mars are going to take over unless you give up your privacy!"
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.
So, 20%? Those are actually prerty good odds for a national topic.
But yeah, nothing is certain about this stuff per se.. Maybe all this blatant corruption wakes some of the not old blocs up. Maybe it's swept under the rug yet again if comfort and relief returns.
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.
This sounds great... in theory. And just sort of assumes that large casualties are acceptable. Or, even worse, that a lone individual can impart change via a well aimed shot, or something.
Both of which are wild and not something the average person should want or expect to happen. Which makes it even stranger that so many people say it all the time.
Have you stopped renegade cops in your community? Or are you only suggesting that other people do, knowing that anyone who attempts it will die?
It just seems insane to seriously suggest fighting a force that has tanks, drones, etc and has full info on where you are at any moment should they decide to take you out with a sniper, and the willingness to use all of those against you while calling you a terrorist.
There is nothing "insane" about it, it is in fact quite simple and straightforward.
It is far more honest to just say "I don't have the stomach for it/I don't want to die" (and there's nothing inherently wrong with that! most humans feel that way) than to pretend that the very well established precedent across history of violence being the only thing that can oust certain forms of tyranny/injustice is somehow beyond your understanding.
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.
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.
Folks should Google "PBA card". I was shocked when I read about that practice.
That seems a little over the top of a parking infraction... Maybe they should be summarily shot too.
I think the point is it's not the parking infraction: it's the attempt to get out of it by signaling that they are a police officer. I agree that kind of thing should be taken more seriously than the small offense it's trying to avoid (though maybe not quite so severely).
I don't know, it depends on context and intent, like nearly all things. But this is put aside because most on HN immediately go: police == bad.
If the cop is illegally parked to get lunch, sure ticket them, and/or report them for discipline.
If the cop is attending an incident and that is the only place to park within a reasonable distance, then that's fine.
However the suggestion that irrespective of context and intent, and even for the first contrived example, the cop should lose their job and pension... Ridiculous.
How you went from "losing your government job and benefits due to corrupt behavior" and "well, may as well kill them!" is certainly interesting.
Its a perfect demonstration of the topic in the thread: loss of privilege is equivalent to ending their life itself
You have clearly missed the point of my comment, I assume on purpose given the first sentence. The second sentence was clearly not serious, and was sarcasm, not some confirmation of "privilege mentality".
It's not interesting it's over the top ridiculous just like the comment I was replying to.
Just last week, two NYPD cops were indicted for evidence tampering for doing exactly that.
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...
The famous case of the cops arresting the nurse for not performing a blood draw without a warrant after a car accident is much the same:
The other driver in the car accident was a drunk off-duty cop who blew a red light and hit the patient (who later died).
Cops simultaneously scrambled to the hospital to get a blood draw there, while also delaying the draw on their buddy for hours.
Cop who performed the arrest was fired. And later sued the department for unfair dismissal, IIRC.
I've always treated most of those kind of videos as staged. I like the idea that that's how it goes down but, almost because it's cathartic, I don't trust that it's real footage, as opposed to, essentially, short film fiction.
> The cops that pull them over always treat them in the softest and most deferential way imaginable.
Without denying I have seen preferential treatment first-hand, you might take a step back and imagine...
You're dealing with someone who entered a career known for its machismo, where they received training on how to use physical violence, including training on shooting a weapon that could quite possibly be with them. This person has been drinking or is flat-out drunk, and it's only a matter of minutes before they realize how screwed they're about to be.
Treating them softly is what you SHOULD do.
We should be asking whether we are content to find ourselves in a world where that soft approach is considered the noteworthy exception.
Drunk driving kills. Fuck this stupid shit.
What's stupid about using a soft approach, instead of a violent approach, to take away a driver's license from a drunk driver?
Why do police so frequently resort to violence that you're probably not surprised to hear bystanders in NYC were shot by cops pursuing a subway turnstile hopper? Let the implications of that sink in for a moment.
Why have I heard so many times about people losing their life after being pulled over for speeding?
> What's stupid about using a soft approach, instead of a violent approach
The options aren't soft vs violent.
The problem with the soft approach is it's all about giving the suspected impaired drive more chances to prove they aren't impaired. It's about avoiding removing them from the road, not avoiding a violent confrontation.
While cops shouldn't be dicks to everyone and they should always work to de-escalate, what they shouldn't do is let someone they think is impaired drive off. And that's what the "soft" approach is all about. It's about letting the arresting officer make excuses like "well, they don't seem THAT drunk" or "Well, they seem a little buzzed, but not that bad."
For a regular citizen, the cops would do a field sobriety test, a breathalyzer blow, and then arrest if it comes back high. That's what they should do for everyone they suspect is impaired.
If we wanted to argue for a softer approach, then I could see removing the criminal aspects of a DUI and instead just focusing on getting that person off the road and potentially revoking their license. But in no case should a cop let someone drive off that they suspect isn't fully sober.
> [Letting someone they think is impaired drive off is] what the "soft" approach is all about. [...] But in no case should a cop let someone drive off that they suspect isn't fully sober.
You are reading more into the vague "softly" term than is present in this thread, instead of "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The options aren't soft vs violent.
That there is a spectrum instead of a binary choice is what I discussed, though maybe it's a regional language quirk: "What's stupid about using a soft[er] approach, instead of a [more] violent approach..."
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.
> with the small hope it will get you out of it
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.
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)
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.
He was powerful enough to hang someone on a flimsy excuse, but not so powerful that he did not need a flimsy excuse. Right in that sweet spot.
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...
FISA warrants were even more incredible, with well below 1% rejection rates.
And then hilariously people would say that this is just evidence that the warrants are all written extremely carefully and conservatively.
> FISA warrants were even more incredible, with well below 1% rejection rates.
That's potentially much less incredible, and in any case not directly comparable, because its the final, not on-first-submission, rate, and also doesn't count applications withdrawn after a preliminary rejection that allows modificaitons but before a final ruling. It only counts the share of those that get a final ruling where that is an approval.
> 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.
I have been told, by a cop, that the exclusionary rule should be eliminated. This is the thing that says that evidence obtained in violation of the 4th amendment cannot be used against you in court. Their argument was that the cops know who the bad guys are and should just be allowed to throw them in prison. End of story.
The stupidity of this is that cops literally used to not exist. People used to have to arrest people themselves and drag them to a magistrate and then prosecute them themselves. Didn't mean society was mad max.
Doubt you'll find many cops who'll know that though.
> If they take their jobs seriously
There's about 0% that's true. Judges and even police are politicians now.
"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
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.
That's correct, the zone is also 100 miles around every international airport.
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.
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.
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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.
There are thousands of cops if not a million outright. I don't think this will be a problem.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with how bargaining works, but you only get the price break if you can come in as a large unified group. Having millions of individuals doesn’t result in a price break. Eg There are millions of private individuals buying health insurance in the US, but they have no bargaining power unless they purchase as a unified block. Individual health insurance policies are notoriously expensive.
Bargaining power can also come from the availability of competition. I don't collectively bargain to buy bread, but it's still competitively priced.
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.
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.
> 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-co...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also the groups that profit of your lack of privacy will heavily lobby/advertise against it using every fear based tactic they can. "Terrorists, child molesters, communists, Trans Mexican aliens from Mars are going to take over unless you give up your privacy!"
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.
No, probably not. For as many Z's that care about privacy there seems to be 4 more that post their lives online.
So, 20%? Those are actually prerty good odds for a national topic.
But yeah, nothing is certain about this stuff per se.. Maybe all this blatant corruption wakes some of the not old blocs up. Maybe it's swept under the rug yet again if comfort and relief returns.
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.
> 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
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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.
This sounds great... in theory. And just sort of assumes that large casualties are acceptable. Or, even worse, that a lone individual can impart change via a well aimed shot, or something.
Both of which are wild and not something the average person should want or expect to happen. Which makes it even stranger that so many people say it all the time.
Have you stopped renegade cops in your community? Or are you only suggesting that other people do, knowing that anyone who attempts it will die?
It just seems insane to seriously suggest fighting a force that has tanks, drones, etc and has full info on where you are at any moment should they decide to take you out with a sniper, and the willingness to use all of those against you while calling you a terrorist.
There is nothing "insane" about it, it is in fact quite simple and straightforward.
It is far more honest to just say "I don't have the stomach for it/I don't want to die" (and there's nothing inherently wrong with that! most humans feel that way) than to pretend that the very well established precedent across history of violence being the only thing that can oust certain forms of tyranny/injustice is somehow beyond your understanding.
How is this not the exact reasoning MAGA uses for Jan. 6
The problem with the difference between good and bad things is, of course, that one's perspective has an impact.
Americans generally think vandalism is wrong, but also that the Boston Tea Party was a good thing - yadda yadda yadda...
I, for one, do not presume that "reasoning" played any part in what transpired on January 6.
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.
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.
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