Supreme Court rules geofence searches require Fourth Amendment protection
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that a geofence warrant — a court order compelling a company such as Google to identify every device in a defined area during a set window — is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, NPR reported . Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said an individual “has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location,” and that police intrude on that interest when they demand the data, even briefly and from a third party. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.
The case grew out of the conviction of Okello Chatrie, who was sentenced to nearly 12 years for a 2019 armed robbery of a Virginia credit union after investigators used a geofence warrant to place his phone near the scene. The Court agreed a search had taken place but did not throw out the evidence; it returned the case to a lower court to determine whether the warrant was reasonable.
The ruling extends the logic of earlier location-privacy decisions to a technique police have leaned on heavily over the past decade. By classifying geofence requests as searches, the Court forces investigators to justify them under Fourth Amendment standards rather than treating bulk location pulls as routine, while leaving the details of when such warrants pass muster to be worked out below.