Supreme Court Examines Constitutionality of Police Accessing Cellphone Location Data

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday heard oral arguments in a case that could change how law enforcement uses cell phone location data to investigate crimes in the digital age.

At the center of Chatrie v. United States is whether law enforcement’s use of “geofence warrants” violates the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches.

It marks the first major Fourth Amendment case the Court has taken since 2018.

Geofence warrants are a relatively new investigative tool that allows police to obtain location data from tech companies such as Apple and Google to identify all devices within a specific area and timeframe. Unlike traditional warrants that begin with a suspect, these warrants operate in reverse, sweeping up data on anyone in the area and allowing investigators to narrow the field from there.

The case arose from a 2019 bank robbery in Virginia. Investigators used a geofence warrant to search Google’s “location history” database and ultimately identify Okello Chatrie as a suspect. Chatrie argued that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment because it authorized the government to search data belonging to multiple people without individualized probable cause.

The district court agreed that the warrant was unconstitutional but admitted the evidence under the good-faith exception because law enforcement reasonably believed they were acting lawfully. The Fourth Circuit also upheld the evidence, but the judges were split on the reasoning.

Now, the Supreme Court has to decide whether accessing that data constituted a search, and if so, whether it was constitutional.

Much of Monday’s arguments focused on whether geofence warrants are the digital equivalent of the “general warrants” the Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit.

Adam Unikowsky, the attorney representing Chatrie, argued that the warrant effectively allowed the government to “search every single person’s account” within the geofence, calling it a “general warrant.”

Several of the justices pushed back on this. Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether the analogy fit historically, given that the warrant in this case identified a specific place, crime, and time frame. “That’s not what this does,” she said, referring to traditional general warrants that allowed offices to search “willy-nilly anywhere you want.”

But Sotomayor still expressed concern about the breadth of the search by saying that location data can reveal highly sensitive personal details to law enforcement. “It’ll allow you to follow a brothel, it’ll follow you to a cannabis shop, it’ll follow you just about anywhere,” she said.

A second major line of questioning centered on whether users voluntarily give up privacy rights by enabling location tracking. Chief Justice John Roberts pressed that point early on, telling Unikowsky: “If you don’t want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off.”

Justice Samuel Alito echoed this, emphasizing that users have a choice. “He voluntarily disclosed to Google the information about where he was going to be,” Alito said, referring to Chatrie’s need to affirmatively enable location tracking.

Unikowsky rejected this argument, warning that accepting it would have sweeping consequences for digital privacy. If voluntary sharing with a company eliminated constitutional protection, he said, “that is really the end of the Fourth Amendment for any private document you’re storing with Google.”

Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch also pressed the implications of that theory, questioning whether it would extend beyond location data to emails, documents and other information stored in the cloud.

Google responded to the geofence warrant in three steps. First, it gave police anonymous location data for all devices in that area. Investigators then reviewed that data and flagged “devices of interest,” prompting the company to provide more detailed location information. Law enforcement narrowed the list further and requested identifying details for three users.

Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether the warrant violated Chatrie’s rights at the first step, noting that the data provided to investigators was anonymized.

Unikowsky responded by saying that anonymity does not eliminate the constitutional problem. “A search is a search even if you don’t know the target of the search,” he said. “If you go to a bank and you break open a safety deposit box … even if you don’t know who owns the box … I still think that counts as a search.”

That analogy led to broader questions about how to analyze digital searches under the existing body of law. Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested the Court might focus on reasonable expectations of privacy rather than whether the data constitutes “property,” noting that the latter approach can be difficult to apply in modern technological contexts.

Some justices also considered narrower ways to resolve the case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed to the multi-step nature of geofence warrants and suggested that the later stages—when investigators request additional information about specific users—might require their own reasonable basis.

Meanwhile, Alito questioned whether the Court should decide the case at all, given the posture of the lower court ruling and changes in the technology. He noted that the evidence had been admitted under the good-faith exception and that the Google feature at issue “doesn’t exist any longer” because location data now gets stored in individual phones.

The government defended the warrant as a limited investigative tool, emphasizing that it was confined by time and geography and that the data was narrowed in stages before a suspect was identified.

But civil liberties advocates argued that geofence warrants invert the traditional logic of the Fourth Amendment by treating everyone in a location as a potential suspect.

Mitha Nandagopalan, a staff attorney with the Innocence Project, one of the many organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of Chatrie, said that the approach risks sweeping in a large number of innocent people.

“They overwhelmingly sweep in data for people not only who have no connection to a crime, but for whom police don’t at the outset have any suspicion to connect them with a crime,” she said.

She also raised concerns about the reliability of location data, noting that inaccuracies can expand the scope of a search beyond its intended boundaries and increase the risk of innocent people being drawn into investigations.

The case comes as courts continue to grapple with how to apply the Fourth Amendment to rapidly evolving technology. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that law enforcement generally must obtain a warrant to access historical cellphone location data, recognizing the sensitivity of that information.

A decision in Chatrie is expected by the end of the term in June.