The Fourth Amendment was designed to stop a specific kind of government behavior: searching the many to find the one. The founders knew about general warrants — the British instruments that authorized officers to search anyone, anywhere, for anything the crown wished to find — because those warrants had been used against them. The prohibition they wrote was specific: warrants must describe the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized. Particularity. Probable cause. Judicial authorization. Three requirements, stated plainly, are violated systematically whenever a government finds them inconvenient.
On April 27, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chatrie v. United States, the first direct constitutional challenge to geofence warrants. A geofence warrant doesn’t start with a suspect. It starts with a location and a time window, then compels a technology company — Google, in this case — to search the location history of every device in that area and return identifying information for users that the government then decides looks interesting. In Chatrie’s case, police identified 19 devices near a 2019 Virginia bank robbery, requested expanded data on nine, and ultimately de-anonymized three — one of whom was Okello Chatrie. He was convicted and sentenced to nearly 12 years.
The mechanism is clever, from a law enforcement perspective. It’s also precisely what the Fourth Amendment was written to prohibit. Police searched the accounts of 19 people. They had probable cause to believe none of them individually was a criminal — that’s the point. The warrant’s function was to generate suspicion, not act on it. The founders called that a general warrant. The government calls it an investigative technique.
Justice Neil Gorsuch raised the question that should worry every American who uses a smartphone. At oral argument, he pressed the government’s attorney on where its theory stops: if a user’s voluntary sharing of location data with Google eliminates Fourth Amendment protection, does that ruling “pertain equally to email”? To photos? To documents? To calendars? To every file stored in the cloud? The government had no clean answer. Neither did its theory, because its theory has no principled limiting principle.
This is the third-party doctrine extended to its logical terminus. The doctrine holds, since United States v. Miller (1976) and Smith v. Maryland (1979), that information voluntarily shared with a third party loses Fourth Amendment protection — because the sharer assumes the risk the recipient will disclose it. In 1979, that doctrine governed bank records and phone numbers dialed. Applied to 2026, it would govern every email in your Gmail account, every photo in your Google Photos library, and every document in your Google Drive. You “voluntarily” stored them with Google. You assumed the risk. The government needs no warrant.
I’ve written before about the third-party doctrine as it applies to financial records — the Securities and Exchange Commission’s administrative subpoena authority, brokerage account data, the progressive elimination of financial privacy in a regulatory environment that treats every transaction as potentially suspicious until proven otherwise. This is the same doctrine, applied at scale. The practical difference between a government that can subpoena your bank records without judicial authorization and a government that can read your email without one is smaller than civil libertarians on the Left and the Right usually acknowledge. The principle is identical. The scope is immeasurably larger.
The court in Carpenter v. United States (2018) carved a narrow exception to the third-party doctrine for long-term cell-site location data, recognizing that comprehensive location surveillance is constitutionally different from the discrete records at issue in Miller and Smith. Chief Justice John Roberts warned explicitly against letting the third-party doctrine swallow the Fourth Amendment in a world where digital intermediaries mediate daily life. The government’s position in Chatrie is an invitation to ignore that warning.
Chatrie’s lawyer put it precisely in oral argument: accepting the government’s voluntary-disclosure theory would be “really the end of the Fourth Amendment for any private document you’re storing with Google.” That’s not hyperbole. Modern Americans don’t store the substance of their lives in desk drawers. They store it in cloud accounts administered by technology companies. If the Constitution treats all of that data as voluntarily exposed because a private company mediates access to it, the Fourth Amendment contracts to cover the physical world and nothing else — a document written for a country that no longer exists, governing a life that no one actually lives.
SUPREME COURT FINDS GEOFENCE WARRANTS CONSTITUTE A SEARCH UNDER FOURTH AMENDMENT
The justices appeared divided. Some want a narrow ruling on geofence warrant procedure that leaves for another day the larger question Gorsuch raised — whether the third-party doctrine can survive contact with cloud storage. That question will not wait. Law enforcement’s geofence requests to Google grew from roughly 982 in 2018 to a peak of nearly 11,550 in 2020. Google has since changed its storage architecture, but other companies hold similar data, and other warrant forms already exploit the same doctrinal gap.
The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment because they understood something permanent about institutional power. Governments that can search widely, cheaply, and without individualized suspicion will do so. They were right in 1791. The mechanism is different now — servers instead of filing cabinets, algorithms instead of officers with lanterns — but the institutional temptation is identical. Chatrie asks whether the court still remembers what the amendment was for. The answer will define digital privacy law for a generation.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.