Justices take up constitutionality of geofence warrants near crime scenes 

WASHINGTON (CN) — The constitutionality of geofence warrants will face Supreme Court review, the justices announced in an order Friday, asking whether the government can call on tech companies to rifle through users’ location data near a crime scene.

Service providers like Google receive continuous location data from users’ cell phones, allowing them to identify all users who were in a particular geographic area at a given time. Law enforcement has seized on the technology, seeking warrants regarding devices within a particular geographic area during a certain time.

Geofencing helped a Virginia detective arrest Okello Chatrie for a 2019 bank robbery where he stole $195,000 in cash. Law enforcement obtained a geofence warrant for cell phone data within a 300 meter diameter around the bank.

A judge authorized the detective’s warrant, and Google came back with anonymized data for 19 users within the geofence. Google provided additional data on nine users at the detective’s request and ultimately deanonymized three numbers. The two subsequent requests to Google were not approved by the judge.

Chatrie was one of the users identified. He was indicted and convicted on bank robbery and firearms charges and sentenced to almost 12 years in prison.

Chatrie told the Supreme Court that the geofence warrant that led to his arrest and conviction violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The constitutionality of such searches have divided the lower courts.

“The uncertainty over geofence warrants is intolerable,” Chatrie wrote. “When magistrate judges receive requests for geofence warrants, they need to know what rules apply. The same is true for tech companies that wish to cooperate with law enforcement while also protecting their users’ privacy and complying with the Constitution.”

The Trump administration said Fourth Amendment questions surrounding geofencing would not impact Chatrie’s case since his conviction was upheld on other grounds. The government downplayed the amount of data that can be obtained during such searches.

“The geofence warrant did not provide the government with an ‘all-encompassing record of [petitioner’s] whereabouts,’ or an ‘intimate window into his personal life,’” the government wrote. “Instead, it provided a record that petitioner had been at the credit union at the time of the robbery — information not much different from other ‘markers’ left at a public crime scene that do not require a warrant, like ‘tire tracks’ or ‘boot prints’ — and a time-boxed amount of information about where he had been before or after.”

Google changed its data storage policy in 2023, saving location history on the users’ device. Therefore, the government says that Google will be unable to respond to geofence warrants going forward.

“Because Google has been ‘the most common recipient’ of geofence warrants, Google’s policy change significantly diminishes the frequency with which geofence-warrant issues will arise in future prosecutions,” the government wrote.

However, Google is not the only tech company receiving geofence warrants. Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo are among other companies who have received law enforcement requests for user information.

The high court will likely schedule arguments in the coming months, with a decision expected later this year.

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