Supreme Court Asked to Ban "Geofencing Warrants"
A civil liberties group is petitioning the Supreme Court to rule that "geofencing warrants" are unconstitutional. The practice, which forces tech companies to hand over data on all devices in a specific area, is argued to violate the Fourth Amendment by sweeping up data from thousands of innocent people.
The case before the Supreme Court, *Chatrie v. United States*, stems from a 2019 armed robbery of a credit union in Virginia. After traditional methods failed, police issued a geofence warrant to Google, which led them to Okello Chatrie. The warrant requested data for all devices within a 17.5-acre area around the bank during the time of the crime. Initially, Google provided anonymized data for 19 devices that were near the robbery. Law enforcement then narrowed its focus and requested more detailed movement data and, ultimately, the personal identities of a few users, including Chatrie. This multi-step process, moving from a broad data dump to de-anonymization, is central to the debate over the warrants' constitutionality. The use of these warrants has grown exponentially. In 2018, Google received 982 such warrants; by 2020, that number had surged to 11,554. At their peak, these requests constituted over a quarter of all data demands Google received from U.S. law enforcement. Critics argue geofence warrants are the digital equivalent of unconstitutional "general warrants," which allow indiscriminate searches and were a key motivation for the Fourth Amendment. They contend that by searching everyone in a given area to find a suspect, the practice flips the probable cause requirement on its head—searching first and establishing suspicion later. Beyond bank robberies, geofence warrants have been used to identify individuals at protests, including those following the death of George Floyd and the January 6th Capitol riot, where data from over 5,000 devices was obtained. This has raised concerns about a chilling effect on First Amendment rights to assembly and association. The lower federal courts are currently split on the issue. The Fourth Circuit, in Chatrie's case, ultimately allowed the evidence, with judges offering fractured reasoning. In contrast, the Fifth Circuit has ruled that geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional, creating the legal conflict that prompts Supreme Court review. In response to growing legal pressure, Google announced a significant policy shift in late 2023. The company is moving location history data from its centralized "Sensorvault" database to be stored locally on users' devices. This change, which includes end-to-end encryption, will make it technologically impossible for Google to comply with broad geofence requests in the future.
