In a big win for protesters’ rights,
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data.
The case, "Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs", arose after a housing protest in 2021,
during which Colorado Springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway.
After the demonstration, police also obtained warrants to seize and search through the devices and data of Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest.
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.
Police further obtained a warrant to search the Facebook page of the Chinook Center, the organization that spearheaded the protest, despite the Chinook Center never having been accused of a crime.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/02/victory-tenth-circuit-finds-fourth-amendment-doesnt-support-broad-search-0