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SAN FRANCISCO— The ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the Center for Protest Law & Litigation, and civil rights attorney Thomas Seabaugh filed a motion today to challenge an unconstitutionally broad search warrant that authorized UCSC police to seize and search a student’s cellphone, in violation of the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), the First and Fourth Amendments, and the California Constitution.
The student, who is a third-year undergraduate and a resident advisor, previously filed a lawsuit against UCSC after it banned her and others from campus for participating in a pro-Palestine, antiwar protest in May 2024. UCSC police sought and obtained a warrant to seize the student’s phone just weeks after she had filed that lawsuit—timing that raises serious concerns about retaliation against the student’s constitutionally protected First Amendment rights.
The warrant gives UCSC police access to years of private communications, location data, and personal photos without reasonable limits on time or scope. "The Fourth Amendment and California law both demand that digital search warrants be narrowly tailored to specific time periods and types of information," said ACLU attorney Chessie Thacher. "But this warrant gave officers permission to sift through extremely private information that predated the student’s time at UCSC by years. When the government can look through someone’s photos and internet searches dating back to when they were a fifth grader to find something that might have happened in college, we have a constitutional problem.”
The warrant also permitted campus police to search through privileged communications between the student and her attorneys about the very litigation that she had brought against the school for police misconduct. "When officers can seize phones and read through attorney-client communications about an active civil rights case, it creates a chilling effect that undermines access to justice," said Rachel Lederman, Senior Counsel with the Center for Protest Law & Litigation. “When police seize a student’s phone while she is outside in her pajamas for a fire drill, in view of numerous other students, we cannot help but think they are trying to intimidate her and other students from engaging in pro-Palestine protest on campus.”
“These days your whole life is on your phone: the places you’ve been, the websites you’ve visited, and the details of your closest relationships. It can also include expressions of political dissent, criticisms of your employer, and the identities of the people whose beliefs you share,” said Thomas Seabaugh. “It is horrifying to think about the authorities coming after all that information just because you dared to exercise your right to challenge their illegal actions in court. This motion we are filing has profound implications for the democratic rights of students, protesters, and dissenters throughout the country, especially at this moment in history.”
The motion asks the court to quash the warrant, order the immediate return of the phone to the student, and require the destruction of any data already obtained through this unlawful search.
