By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — When an investigation into a Virginia bank robbery went cold a few years back, local police turned to Google.
Authorities served the tech giant with a “geofence warrant,” which required the company to parse location data on millions of people to find a handful whose cellphones pegged them within 300 meters of the bank at the time of the robbery.
With the data in hand, police solved their case. They also triggered a constitutional challenge that is now before the Supreme Court.
The justices will debate Monday whether the sweeping warrants, which are directed at tech companies rather than individual suspects, are consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches.
At a time when Americans store vast amounts of data online, the court’s decision could make it easier for law enforcement to solve crimes but also expose troves of personal information to authorities.
“It’s huge,” said William McGeveran, dean of the University of Minnesota Law School and an expert in data privacy law. “The issues involved apply to any of the digital technology that is tracking your location, which is a lot of things.”
In Virginia, police say Okello Chatrie passed a note urging a bank teller in 2019 to “hand over all the cash” and demanded “at least 100k and nobody will get hurt and your family will be set free.” Initially, police were unable to identify a suspect, but officers noticed on security cameras that the suspect was using his phone before the robbery. That’s when they sought the location data from Google.
After police identified Chatrie, authorities executed federal search warrants and found “robbery-style demand notes” in his bedroom, nearly $100,000 in cash and a 9 mm pistol. Police say Chatrie confessed to the robbery and was ultimately sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea but reserved the right to appeal over the geofence warrant. The Richmond-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him, holding that the warrant didn’t constitute a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes. After all, the court reasoned that when people allow tech companies to collect data they generally do so voluntarily. It is an argument that the Justice Department, which is defending the warrants, relies on heavily.
Chatrie “took no steps to protect his location from disclosure, such as pausing the Location History feature he had enabled or adjusting, deactivating, or forgoing his cellphone during his crime,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court.
But Chatrie’s attorneys argue that the logic doesn’t apply to his case, in part because of a 2018 Supreme Court precedent. In that case, Carpenter v. US, a divided court ruled that law enforcement generally needs to establish probable cause before accessing cellphone tower data to identify the movements of suspects. If authorities need a warrant to get cellphone tower data, Chatrie’s attorneys said, then surely they also must obtain one to get data that is far more reliable.
The location data at issue in Chatrie’s case can identify a person’s location within 3 meters every two minutes.
“The technology may be novel, but the constitutional problem it presents is not,” Chatrie’s lawyer, Adam Unikowsky, told the Supreme Court. “The Fourth Amendment was born of the Founders’ revulsion for general warrants and writs of assistance — instruments that allowed the government to search first and develop suspicions later.”
In the Carpenter decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, was in the majority with the then-four-justice liberal wing. Three current conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — were in dissent.
Three justices have joined the bench since then, conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Unpredictable alliances
Geofence warrants have divided lower courts and Fourth Amendment cases can make for unpredictable alliances on the Supreme Court, which is attempting to square language that was ratified in 1791 with GPS trackers, chats with artificial intelligence and doorbell cameras.
In an important 1967 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment required federal agents to obtain a warrant before tapping a payphone. The decision established the idea that the Constitution protects against searches even absent a physical intrusion. A concurring opinion in that decision from Justice John Marshall Harlan II, nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, suggested that searches occur whenever the government infringes on a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
That idea has been a dominant force in the court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for decades.
In 1979, the court ruled that police did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they obtained from the phone company a pen register — a device that recorded phone numbers dialed — from a suspect’s home. In that case, the court reasoned that the dialed numbers were “business records” and that a suspect did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy to them because he had voluntarily disclosed the number he dialed to the phone company.
More recently, in 2012, a unanimous court held that police could not place a GPS tracker on a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant. That decision, which was joined by five members of the current court, was important because it revived the idea that the Constitution protects people’s property from an unreasonable search. Computer data, Chatrie argues, is a form of a property — a modern analogue of the “papers and effects” specifically cited in the Fourth Amendment.
Google, which had received the majority of the warrants, changed its policy to shift how the data is stored. Because of that, the federal government had initially argued that the case was effectively moot.
But, McGeveran said, the principles at stake could nevertheless have as far reach as financial transactions, photos, emails and an incalculable amount of other information makes its way to online storage.
“It might not be the same kind of one-stop shopping for law enforcement,” he said, “but it’s still a technology that they’re very likely to use.”
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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