Supreme Court to rule on geofence warrants

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in a case that could fundamentally reshape how law enforcement uses digital surveillance — and whether a technique that helped solve a Virginia bank robbery violates the Fourth Amendment.

The case centers on Okello Chatrie, who robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, making off with $195,000 in 2019. When police hit a dead end, they served Google with a geofence warrant — a court order that draws a virtual perimeter around a location and time, then collects the location history of every device that was in that area.

The warrant identified Chatrie's phone among a handful of devices near the bank during the robbery. Police then obtained a traditional warrant to search his home and found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bank teller bands. Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years.

But his lawyers argue the geofence warrant was unconstitutional — a digital dragnet that swept up the location data of innocent people who happened to be near the bank, without any individualized suspicion they were involved in a crime.

Geofence warrants invert the traditional investigative process. Instead of identifying a suspect first and then getting a warrant to search their property, police start with a location and work backward to find suspects. Prosecutors credit the technique with solving cold cases and crimes where surveillance footage was inconclusive. The same technology was used to identify January 6 rioters and the individual who planted pipe bombs outside party headquarters the night before the Capitol attack.

Civil liberties groups call it a fishing expedition. Law professors who study digital surveillance warn that a ruling in favor of geofence warrants could "unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches."

The Policing Project at NYU Law School argues for a middle path, warning that the Trump administration's position would allow geofence warrants with no judicial safeguards, while Chatrie's lawyers want to ban them entirely — both extremes the group considers unwise.

The lower courts are split. The Fourth Circuit upheld Chatrie's conviction, while the Fifth Circuit ruled that geofence warrants "are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment."

The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States — which held that accessing historical cell-site location information requires a warrant — will loom large. Chief Justice Roberts wrote then about the "seismic shifts in digital technology" and the "exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected" by carriers. The question now is whether that logic extends to data you didn't even know your phone was sharing.

What This Means For You: Your phone tracks where you go, and Google stores that data. Right now, police can request all of it with a single warrant that names no suspect — just a time and place. If the Supreme Court upholds geofence warrants, every time you walk past a crime scene, your location becomes potential evidence. If they strike them down, some cold cases will go unsolved. Either way, this decision will define the boundary between public safety and personal privacy in the smartphone era.