Supreme Court to weigh geofence warrants in major 4th Amendment test

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in a case testing whether geofence warrants, a powerful digital surveillance tool used by police to find criminal suspects, violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. The case involves Okello Chatrie, who was convicted of a 2019 bank robbery in Virginia after police used Google location data to identify him, and it could set a major precedent for digital privacy in an era of ubiquitous data collection.

“The potential for abuse is breathtaking: the government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally, or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there,” Chatrie’s lawyers said in a court filing, arguing the practice is a modern-day equivalent of the general warrants the founders sought to prohibit.

After the investigation into the $195,000 robbery stalled, police served Google with a warrant for location data from all devices near the credit union around the time of the crime. The initial search returned data for 19 anonymous devices, which investigators narrowed down to identify Chatrie. Civil liberties groups argue this process flips the Fourth Amendment on its head, searching everyone in an area first to find a suspect later.

A ruling could either significantly curtail a technique that law enforcement credits with cracking cold cases and identifying suspects in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, or it could open the door to broader government searches of personal data held by tech companies. The decision will force the court to apply 18th-century constitutional principles to a level of digital tracking the framers could never have imagined, with Google alone having location history for more than 500 million users.

A Digital Dragnet

Privacy advocates and tech companies, including Google, have warned that upholding geofence warrants could lead to serious invasions of privacy for innocent people. Critics point to the technique's broad-brush nature, which can scoop up data from hundreds or thousands of individuals with no connection to a crime.

In court filings, Google said it has objected to overly broad requests, including a warrant seeking data from a 2.5-square-mile area of San Francisco and another that would have captured information on 3,000 users in Albuquerque, New Mexico, including attendees at a funeral service. The American Civil Liberties Union argues these digital dragnets are precisely the kind of general warrant forbidden by the Constitution, capable of revealing sensitive personal information, from visits to a psychiatrist to attendance at a political protest. In response to these concerns, Google announced that by July 2025, it would migrate location-history data to users’ individual devices, making it technically impossible for the company to conduct these broad searches on its servers.

An Irreplaceable Investigative Tool

Law enforcement officials defend the warrants as a critical and legitimate tool for solving major crimes when traditional methods fail. Prosecutors have used the technology to identify suspects in killings across several states and to find the individual who planted pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican party headquarters before the Jan. 6 riot.

The government, in its brief, argued that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy for their movements in public places, information they voluntarily share with third parties like Google by opting into location services. "Eliminating geofence warrants would handicap the investigation of major crimes," wrote Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the federal government's position. A federal appeals court in New Orleans previously ruled that geofence warrants are "general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment," creating a split that the Supreme Court is now tasked with resolving.

The court’s decision, expected by early July, will have ripple effects beyond just geofencing. Legal experts warn that a ruling in favor of the government could set a precedent for other "reverse searches" of large datasets, including search engine histories, cloud storage, and even conversations with AI chatbots, further blurring the lines of privacy in the digital age.

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