Nate Anderson reports:
In 2019, Haley Olson’s life in Grant County, Oregon, was upended when people in town appeared to know about private nude photos that Olson kept on her phone. Worse, some of the people appeared to have seen and shared the photos. The incidents all had some relationship to the local sheriff’s department, where Olson was dating one of the deputies.
[…]
However, Carpenter was found to have “qualified immunity” from prosecution as a government employee because, although he violated Olson’s Fourth Amendment rights, the law remained unclear in 2019. This case was slightly more complicated than a garden-variety warrantless search because Olson had voluntarily renounced some rights over in Idaho, and it was at least arguable at the time that this might have extended to other searches of the cell phone image for other reasons.
The 9th Circuit issued clarifying guidance in this area, saying that further searches of cell phones for unrelated reasons do, in fact, require a warrant, but all three judges declined to issue any penalties against Carpenter for his 2019 actions.
Read more at Ars Technica.
I think this is bullshit. Haley should have gotten some compensation for this and Carpenter should have gotten fired.