Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion. Photograph: Grace Cary/Getty ImagesJustice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion. Photograph: Grace Cary/Getty ImagesUS supreme court rules geofence warrants require constitutional privacy protectionsLaw enforcement’s use of warrants sweeping smartphone location data requires privacy protections, court rules
The US supreme court has ruled that law enforcement’s use of sprawling warrants that sweep up smartphone location data requires privacy protections under the fourth amendment, in a boost to critics who view their use as an unconstitutional dragnet.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion.
The use of geofence warrants is widespread, and gives law enforcement agencies the power to compel tech companies to hand over sensitive cell phone data from people at or near crime scenes. Police agencies and the FBI have used geofence warrants to collect this information from individuals that fall within the radius of a virtual “fence” during a particular timeframe. They aren’t restricted to requesting data for precise targets.
That has alarmed privacy advocates, who say these sweeping warrants can be overly broad in the area they target, as well as the length of time they cover. “If the government doesn’t need to … link something to a crime, it could monitor a protest or an abortion clinic or a gun range or a church or an AA meeting or a doctor’s office,” says Matthew Tokson, a law professor at the University of Utah.
The Chatrie case focuses on local police’s pursuit of an armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty.
Chatrie’s lawyers argued that this search was overly broad and violated his fourth amendment rights, which protects individuals from “unreasonable search and seizure.” Lawyers said that police’s use of geofence warrants amounted to an official “search” under the Fourth Amendment, and didn’t meet the constitution’s requirements for one.
Law enforcement has said they need these geofence warrants to find suspects and witnesses–after reaching dead ends. The US government, for its part, has argued that people can’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” when they are in public and have allowed a third party company, such as Google, to collect and analyze phone location data.
The government noted in its legal filings that “only about one-third of active Google account holders actually opted into the location history service”; Chatrie’s lawyers noted in court documents that this amounted to more than 500 million Google users. Even Google has acknowledged in legal filings for the case that geofence searches “often run a high risk of sweeping in innocent users–sometimes thousands of them.” The tech company said that it’s common for these inquiries to cover private homes, apartment buildings, government buildings, hotels, places of worship, busy roads, and other locations that law enforcement hasn’t identified probable cause to search.
The ruling marks the first time the US supreme court is considering the scope of the fourth amendment since a landmark 2018 privacy ruling. At the time, judges decided in a 5-4 decision that the government generally needs a warrant to track a person’s cellphone location history.
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