Now, an investigation by Mother Jones confirms that the FBI used software from the Israeli firm Cellebrite to secretly extract data from the phones of Bray-Waters and at least a dozen other protesters. A month later, one of those protesters, Thalia Ramirez, would be indicted as part of the Spokane 9 case, in which the federal government charged nine people with “conspiracy to impede or injure” officers at the June 11 protest. Every other protester whose phone was extracted in June had their misdemeanor charges promptly dismissed in city and county courts.

“This sounds like a case in which the government basically had a blank check to hoover up everyone’s data,” said Tom Bowman, policy counsel at the Security and Surveillance Project of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. The extractions, Bowman said, underscore the danger of sweeping conspiracy charges: “Your mere proximity to somebody else can be used to justify an invasive search into your entire digital life.”