Where's the probable cause?

This is probably not as baseless as you might think in the wake of the Lori Drew case:

Christopher said in his application that, following a dispute between Calixte and his roommate in January, the roommate told an officer that Calixte was "involved in some computer hacking incidents." Christopher subsequently interviewed the roommate, who said among other things that Calixte has a reputation as a "hacker," uses two different operating systems to allegedly "hide his illegal activities," and that Calixte had hacked into the university grading system to change students' grades. The roommate also told Christopher that he had been the victim of a mass e-mail incident in which someone sent out attachments to a fake profile of the roommate on a gay Web site.

The police department was later asked to look into the origin of the mass e-mails, given the stress endured by the roommate, and the e-mails were allegedly traced back to Calixte. Christopher subsequently obtained the warrant in question, claiming that given all the information submitted about Calixte, his property would constitute evidence of the crimes of "obtaining computer services by fraud or misrepresentation" and obtaining "unauthorized access to a computer system."

The EFF is arguing it is irrelevant whether or not Calixte sent the e-mails, since the application for the warrant fails to establish probable cause that sending such an e-mail is a criminal offense.

Calixte "stands accused of fraud, though no money or thing of value is at issue," EFF said in its statement of support. "He is accused of 'hacking' merely by sending an e-mail to a list server. Without a crime, there is no just cause for the search."

I am not a lawyer, but I bet that Calixte broke the terms of use for his campus's network when he pulled that stunt with his roommate and the gay web site. He could probably also be charged with harassing his roommate and causing emotional damage (whatever the law for that is called). Combine those two facts with the twisted arguments used in the Lori Drew case with the fact that the judge ruled in favor of the prosecution in that case, and this case may not be quite as baseless as assumed. In that case, violating terms of service in conjunction with a crime was ruled itself to be a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Objectively speaking, the evidence against Calixte is not very strong. So far it seems to just be little more than hearsay from a person who has been in conflict with him and who may have a good motive for making him look bad to the police. Furthermore, the presence of two operating systems on a computer is no more a legitimate source of probable cause for seizing and searching his property than the presence of common kitchen utensils in the house of an alleged murderer thought to have stabbed his victim to death. By itself, it has absolutely no common correlation with criminal activity, and it's a stretch to argue that someone would use an operating system like Linux to "hide evidence of their crimes" when it is fairly well-known by such users that forensics specialists are no more deterred by that OS than Windows.

If this is all they had when executing this warrant, then the judge really needs to suppress the evidence gained from this warrant.