The Supreme Court Doesn't Know What to Do With Geofence Warrants. Neither Does Anyone Else.
In 2019, a man robbed a Virginia bank at gunpoint and walked off with $195,000. The investigation went cold. Police went to Google. They served a geofence warrant — a legal instrument that compels the company to produce location data on every phone within a defined radius of a crime scene during a defined window. Nineteen accounts came back. One of them was Okello Chatrie. He is now serving nearly twelve years.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Chatrie v. United States last week. Two hours of oral argument produced one clear conclusion: the justices are split, and the usual alignments are scrambled. Neil Gorsuch, the court’s most reliable skeptic of government power, pressed the Justice Department on what happens when its logic — that voluntarily sharing data with a tech company waives Fourth Amendment protection — extends to email, photos, and calendars. Amy Coney Barrett admitted she has no idea how her own data is stored. Samuel Alito wondered aloud why the court was bothering, since Google no longer stores location data in the centralized form that made the original warrant possible.
The Fourth Amendment was ratified in 1791 and says nothing about cloud infrastructure. The court has spent the past decade trying to retrofit eighteenth-century text to a surveillance environment the founders could not have imagined. Its 2018 ruling on cell-site location data was 5-4. Chatrie looks to produce something similarly narrow — probably a ruling that neither condemns geofencing categorically nor endorses it wholesale, but draws some line about scope and probable cause that law enforcement can route around within the year.
The civil liberties argument is straightforward: geofence warrants are general warrants, the precise thing the Fourth Amendment was written to prohibit. They identify suspects by proximity rather than suspicion. Everyone whose phone was near the bank that morning got searched. The government’s counter is that users voluntarily gave their location to Google. There is something uncomfortable about both positions. A ruling for the government ratifies dragnet digital surveillance. A ruling for Chatrie might make geofencing unusable in exactly the cases — cold investigations with no named suspect — where it is most valuable.
The 5th Circuit already ruled geofence warrants categorically unconstitutional. The 4th Circuit upheld them. The Supreme Court will issue something before the term ends. Whatever it says, it will not be the last word.