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The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their cellphone location data, tossing out a ruling against a man convicted in a Virginia bank robbery case.
The justices held 6-3 that law enforcement’s use of a geofence warrant to identify Okello Chatrie was a search under the Fourth Amendment and sent the case back to a lower court for review.
“Because this is a ‘court of review, not a first view,’ the Court leaves it up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.
Chatrie is serving nearly 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to robbing a credit union in the Richmond, Va., suburbs in 2019.
He was identified through the use of a geofence warrant, a type of “reverse warrant” that compels technology companies to provide data from all devices at a specific place and time. The tool is typically employed by investigators when they know specific details of a crime but don’t yet have a suspect.
Law enforcement sought that data after seeing security camera footage of the unknown robbery suspect using a cellphone. Investigators pinpointed Chatrie’s identity after narrowing their lists of potential suspects using anonymized data from all devices in a 17.5-acre radius around the bank.
Chatrie moved to suppress the location data in court on the grounds that it violated his Fourth Amendment rights. A district court judge agreed but also found that the evidence was still admissible because police had acted under the good-faith exception.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld the ruling in a divided decision. The case went to the Supreme Court, where the government argued that there was not a “reasonable expectation” that Chatrie’s data would be kept private when he voluntarily shared it with a third party.
“Petitioner here is asking for an unprecedented transformation of the Fourth Amendment into an impregnable fortress around records of his public movements that he affirmatively consented to allow Google to create, maintain and use,” Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin told the court during oral arguments in April.
The Supreme Court rejected that argument.
“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday narrows the scope of what cloud-stored data the federal government can lawfully obtain without an individualized warrant.
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