The Justice Department argued Wednesday that geofence warrants are legal law enforcement tools that are “fully consistent with the Constitution,” as the widely used practice in criminal investigations is set to face scrutiny before the Supreme Court in April.
A geofence warrant is a request made by the government to a technology company, such as Google, in this case, for information about devices that were physically within a certain geographic parameter during a certain period of time. In the case of Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court will examine Okello Chatrie’s claim that the Justice Department’s use of a geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. In Chatrie’s case, the data from the geofence warrant were able to connect him to a bank robbery, for which he was convicted.
The Justice Department filed a brief to the high court defending the constitutionality of geofence warrants, noting that it can only obtain one by going through a three-step process before a magistrate judge. The DOJ argued in the brief that previous rulings from the Supreme Court show there is not a Fourth Amendment protection “from the discovery of two hours of public movements,” especially for a service, in this case Google, that Chatrie opted into sharing his location and other information with.
“An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see, that he has opted to allow a third party to analyze for its own purposes, and that are sufficiently short-term that they reveal little, if anything, about the patterns of his life—particularly when his identity remains anonymous,” the DOJ brief reads.
The DOJ also warned that Chatrie’s stance would foreclose law enforcement from ever being able to “obtain any of the location information that he permitted Google to collect, store, and use—even with a
warrant.”
“His path to that counterintuitive result requires a number of novel Fourth Amendment innovations and would push the Court far out ahead of legislatures and common-law courts, where complex issues— such as questions about ownership of personal data, contract law on the Internet, and the proper boundary lines of online privacy—are still being debated and developed,” the DOJ brief reads.
In his brief filed earlier this month, Chatrie argued that geofence warrants clearly violate the Fourth Amendment’s intention to avoid permitting a “search first and develop suspicions later” approach to law enforcement. Chatrie’s lawyers wrote that “the technology may be novel, but the constitutional problem it presents is not.”
“To find the few people near a crime scene, the government compels a search of every account with Location History enabled—millions of people, all over the country, whose private digital papers must be searched so that the government can identify who was where and when,” Chatrie’s brief to the Supreme Court reads.
“The potential for abuse is breathtaking: the government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally, or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there,” the brief continues. “The Fourth Amendment was adopted to ensure that the government could never wield such power.”
SUPREME COURT TO DETERMINE LEGALITY OF GEOFENCE WARRANTS
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in Chatrie v. United States on April 27, during its final scheduled week of oral arguments for the term. After the high court hears arguments in the case, a decision is expected by the end of June.
As the Supreme Court enters the home stretch of its current term, the justices will hear arguments in several key cases, including the one regarding geofence warrants. Other notable oral arguments in the coming weeks include a case over President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order and in the president’s bids to end temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians.