The Supreme Court ruled Monday that law enforcement’s use of a geofence warrant to obtain cellphone location data constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, marking a significant privacy ruling while stopping short of declaring the investigative tactic unconstitutional.
In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the justices vacated a lower court ruling involving Virginia defendant Okello Chatrie and sent the case back to the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for further proceedings to determine whether the search was nevertheless reasonable under the Constitution.
The case stems from the 2019 armed robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. After exhausting other investigative leads, police obtained a court-approved geofence warrant directing Google to identify devices located within roughly 150 meters of the credit union during a one-hour window surrounding the robbery.
Google initially produced anonymized location data for 19 users who had opted into the company’s “Location History” feature. Investigators ultimately identified Chatrie, whose subsequent arrest led authorities to recover nearly $100,000 in cash, a pistol, and what prosecutors described as robbery demand notes. Chatrie later pleaded guilty while preserving his right to challenge the warrant.
Writing for the majority in Chatrie v. United States, Kagan concluded that compelling Google to search its users’ location records and disclose the results to law enforcement amounted to a Fourth Amendment search. However, rather than suppressing the evidence outright, the justices instructed the lower courts to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Constitution’s requirement that searches be reasonable.
The ruling represents the Supreme Court’s latest effort to apply Fourth Amendment protections to rapidly evolving digital technologies. In its landmark 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States, the court held that police generally must obtain a warrant before accessing historical cellphone location records from wireless carriers.
The decision could have implications beyond geofence warrants, including other forms of so-called reverse warrants that seek to identify unknown suspects through digital records.
Attorneys for Brian Cole Jr., a separate Virginia criminal defendant charged last year with allegedly planting pipe bombs outside the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, previously told a federal judge that the Supreme Court’s review of the Chatrie case could affect litigation over cellphone data law enforcement obtained in Cole’s prosecution.
“We don’t believe there were necessarily geofence warrants here, but there were cellphone dump warrants, which implicate some of the same Fourth Amendment issues,” defense attorney Joseph Alex Little told the court during a January hearing. An attorney for Cole was not available to comment to the Washington Examiner.
When asked whether the decision in Chatrie could lead to other Fourth Amendment disputes over cellphone data dumps like the dispute raised by Cole’s counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance attorney Andreia Trifoi said, “There are lots of similar places where the third-party doctrine comes into play, and we think it is currently being abused.” NCLA argued the case on behalf of Chatrie.
“People may not even know that their location is being recorded, and people treat their cellphones as their diaries. It’s an extension of oneself,” said Trifoi. “So, I think we could definitely see this being expanded into other third-party doctrine cases.”
The doctrine, established in a pair of Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, follows the principle that when private information is shared with someone else, a person is taking the risk that it may be shared with the police or government. Critics today argue that the doctrine is outdated because in the digital age, sharing data with companies is less avoidable than it was half a century ago.
DC PIPE BOMB SUSPECT PLEADS NOT GUILTY TO TERRORISM AND WMD CHARGES
The ruling also comes after previously unsealed court records revealed Google unsuccessfully fought a separate Justice Department warrant seeking information about hundreds of users who searched online for the locations of the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters during the pipe bomb investigation, arguing the request swept too broadly and risked exposing the political activity of innocent users.
In response, Google announced in 2023 that it would no longer maintain access to its users’ location histories.