Key facts
- The US Supreme Court ruled that geofence warrants require Fourth Amendment privacy protections.
- Law enforcement uses geofence warrants to obtain cell phone location data from individuals near crime scenes.
- Privacy advocates argue these warrants are overly broad and can ensnare innocent individuals.
- The ruling stems from a case involving Okello Chatrie, tracked via geofence warrants after a bank robbery.
- The Supreme Court's decision marks a significant privacy ruling concerning digital location data.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement's use of geofence warrants, which compel tech companies to hand over sensitive cell phone location data from individuals near crime scenes, requires privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment. This decision is a significant victory for privacy advocates who have criticized these warrants as unconstitutional dragnet surveillance.
Justice Elena Kagan authored the majority opinion, emphasizing that these sweeping warrants can be overly broad in their geographic scope and temporal reach. Critics, such as law professor Matthew Tokson, argue that such warrants could be used to monitor activities at protests, abortion clinics, or places of worship without specific probable cause.
The case specifically involved Okello Chatrie, who was tracked using geofence warrants after fleeing a bank robbery in Richmond, Virginia. Chatrie had opted into Google's "location history" feature, which documented his movements. His lawyers argued that the police's use of geofence warrants constituted an "unreasonable search and seizure" under the Fourth Amendment.
Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have defended the use of geofence warrants as a necessary tool to identify suspects and witnesses when other investigative avenues have been exhausted. The US government contended that individuals do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public locations when they allow third-party companies like Google to collect and analyze their location data. The government also noted that only about one-third of active Google account holders opt into location history.
Even Google acknowledged in legal filings that geofence searches carry a high risk of including innocent users, sometimes thousands, and can encompass private residences, places of worship, and other locations for which law enforcement has not established probable cause. This ruling is the first time the Supreme Court has addressed the scope of the Fourth Amendment concerning cellphone location data since a landmark 2018 decision that generally requires warrants for tracking such information.