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The Supreme Court will decide whether police can collect location data from everyone in a neighborhood to solve crimes. On January 16, 2026, the justices agreed to hear Chatrie v. United States, a case about warrants that target all phones in a specific area—what law enforcement calls a geofence warrant. These warrants have been used thousands of times to investigate crimes ranging from bank robberies to the January 6 Capitol riot.
Here’s what makes this different from a normal search warrant: Instead of naming a specific person or place to search, geofence warrants work backwards. Police draw a virtual perimeter around a location—say, 150 meters around a bank that was robbed—and request data on every single phone that was inside that boundary during a specific time window.
Google (or Apple, or whoever holds the data) hands over anonymized location records for potentially hundreds of devices. Investigators review the movement patterns, looking for phones that arrived before the crime and left after. Then they go back and ask the company to reveal who owns the suspicious devices.
The whole process happens without anyone whose data gets swept up knowing about it. You could be getting coffee next to a crime scene, and your phone’s location history becomes part of an investigation. No warrant with your name on it. No notice. Your movements get catalogued and analyzed because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Bank Robbery That Became a Constitutional Test Case
Okello Chatrie got caught this way. In May 2019, the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, was robbed, with the perpetrator making off with $195,000. Investigators had limited leads, so they obtained a geofence warrant and served it on Google, requesting data for every device within 150 meters of the bank during a one-hour window around the robbery.
Google complied. Multiple devices showed up in the data. That’s how they identified Chatrie. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
His lawyers argued the warrant violated the constitutional rule that protects people from unfair searches. A federal judge agreed it was unconstitutional but allowed the evidence anyway under a rule that allows evidence even if the search was illegal, if the officer thought they were following the law—what courts call the “good faith exception.”
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—reached the opposite conclusion in a different case, ruling that geofence warrants do violate the Constitution. Same investigative tool, opposite constitutional outcomes depending on which part of the country you’re in. That’s the kind of split—when different federal courts reach opposite conclusions—the Supreme Court exists to resolve.
How Geofence Warrants Work
When you turn on Location History in Google Maps—which millions of people do, often without understanding what they’re enabling—your phone continuously reports where you are. Google stores this data centrally (or at least it used to; more on that later). The precision is remarkable: not which neighborhood you’re in, but which building, sometimes which floor.
A geofence warrant exploits this. Investigators identify a crime scene and a time window. They get a judge to sign off on a warrant describing that geographic boundary and time period. Then they serve it on Google, which runs a search of its entire database and returns anonymized data—device IDs with timestamps and coordinates, but no names attached yet.
Investigators review these movement patterns. A device that showed up five minutes before the robbery, stayed for three minutes, then left? Interesting. A device that was there for two hours because someone was having lunch at the restaurant next door? Probably not relevant.
Once officers narrow it down to a few promising leads, they go back to Google and ask for the names behind the device IDs: the names, email addresses, and subscriber information for those specific device IDs.
That’s three separate data requests, but often one warrant. At every step, Google is searching records of people who aren’t suspected of anything. The initial search might capture 200 devices. Maybe 150 of those belong to people who were nearby—workers in adjacent buildings, customers at neighboring businesses, people driving past. Their data gets pulled into a criminal investigation without their knowledge, without individualized suspicion, without any connection to wrongdoing except geographic proximity.
Law Enforcement’s Perspective
From an investigator’s perspective, geofence warrants solve a real problem. You’ve got a crime scene but no suspect. Maybe the surveillance footage is too grainy to identify faces. Maybe there are no witnesses. Maybe the physical evidence—shell casings, fingerprints—doesn’t match anyone in the database. Traditional investigative methods hit a wall.
A geofence warrant offers a way forward. It lets you start with what you know—the scene and time of the crime—and work backward to identify who was there. In Chatrie’s case, that approach worked. The bank got robbed, the warrant identified devices at the scene, and investigators connected one of those devices to Chatrie, who was ultimately convicted.
Google has changed its policies. Location History data is now stored locally on users’ devices rather than centrally on Google’s servers, which makes geofence warrants technically impossible going forward. But that doesn’t address the thousands of cases already investigated using geofence warrants, or the historical data still sitting in Google’s systems from before the policy change, or the fundamental constitutional question of whether this kind of dragnet data collection is permissible in the first place.
The Fourth Amendment and General Warrants
The Fourth Amendment wasn’t written in a vacuum. The Framers had lived under British rule, where authorities used “general warrants” and documents that let British authorities search wherever they wanted—what they called “writs of assistance.” The colonists hated it.
So when they wrote the Bill of Rights, they included language requiring that warrants “particularly describe the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Civil liberties groups argue that a warrant describing “all devices within 150 meters of this bank during this hour” isn’t specific—it’s the opposite. It’s a fishing expedition. The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation point out that geofence warrants could be used to identify all attendees at an abortion clinic, a political protest, a union meeting, or a mosque during Friday prayers. The warrant doesn’t distinguish between the person who committed a crime and the person who happened to be nearby. It collects data from all bystanders first, asks questions later.
Privacy advocates say the initial anonymity is theater. In Chatrie’s case, it took three requests to get from anonymized data to a name and an arrest. The anonymity provided no meaningful protection—it added a procedural step before the inevitable revealing of names.
The government argues that because you shared your whereabouts with Google voluntarily, you gave up any expectation of privacy in that data. But the Supreme Court pushed back on that logic in its 2018 decision Carpenter v. United States, which held that officers need a warrant to access historical data showing which cell phone tower your phone connected to. The justices recognized that a complete record of everywhere you go and when you go there is different from isolated pieces of information. Your whereabouts at one moment might not be private, but the totality of your movements—where you go, when, how often—reveals intimate details about your life that deserve constitutional protection.
If the Court Bans Geofence Warrants
A ban on geofence warrants wouldn’t leave investigators helpless, but it would force them back to more labor-intensive methods.
They could still get warrants for specific suspects’ data—they’d need to identify the suspect first and establish probable cause before requesting the records. That’s how warrants are supposed to work: particularized suspicion about an individual, then a search for evidence against that person. Not a mass collection followed by sorting to find someone suspicious.
Cell tower data would still be available with a warrant, though it’s far less precise than Google’s records. Cell towers cover areas measured in miles, not meters. In a dense urban environment, that might not narrow things down much.
Video surveillance, witness interviews, informants, forensic analysis of physical evidence—all the traditional tools would remain. They’re slower and more resource-intensive than querying a database.
Law enforcement will argue that some crimes will go unsolved without geofence warrants, that dangerous people will escape justice because investigators couldn’t bridge the gap between a crime scene and a suspect’s identity. Privacy advocates will respond that the Constitution sometimes requires us to accept that trade-off—that we don’t abandon fundamental rights because doing so would make investigations easier.
The justices could take a middle path: upholding geofence warrants in principle but imposing stricter requirements. Maybe investigators need to demonstrate probable cause about the crime itself before requesting even anonymized data. Maybe they need separate warrants for each stage of revealing names. Maybe there are time and geographic limits that make the search more targeted and less dragnet-like.
But that kind of nuanced ruling requires the justices to essentially write new rules for digital-age searches. Legislatures are better suited for that kind of detailed policymaking. The Court’s job is to say whether geofence warrants, as currently practiced, violate the Constitution.
Implications for Other Digital Surveillance Tools
Geofence warrants are one example of a broader category of investigative tools that involve asking tech companies to search their databases and return everything matching certain parameters. Warrants that ask Google to find all users who searched for specific words work the same way. Amazon has received requests for data from Echo devices that might have recorded audio during crimes. License plate readers capture the movements of every car that passes, creating databases that can be searched retroactively. Facial recognition systems can identify all individuals who appeared in a specific area during a specific time.
The constitutional principles the Supreme Court articulates in Chatrie will influence how judges evaluate all of these technologies. If the justices say the Constitution permits collecting data from bystanders first, then looking through it later to find suspects, that green-lights a lot of surveillance tools. If they say the specificity requirement and the prohibition on general warrants apply with full force in the digital age, that constrains what investigators can do.
The technology keeps advancing. Google’s decision to store data locally rather than centrally might make geofence warrants obsolete, but it doesn’t address the underlying constitutional question. Other companies still collect and centralize records. New technologies will create new opportunities for mass surveillance. The Court’s reasoning in this case will provide the framework for evaluating those future tools.
Timeline and Possible Outcomes
Oral arguments will likely happen sometime between March and October 2026, with a decision expected by June 2027 at the latest. The justices limited their review to whether the execution of the geofence warrant violated the Constitution, notably declining to address whether the exclusionary rule—the rule that illegally obtained evidence can’t be used in court—should apply.
That suggests the justices might find a constitutional violation but still allow Chatrie’s conviction to stand under the good faith exception—a compromise that would establish the constitutional rule going forward without overturning past convictions obtained in reliance on the old understanding.
The composition of the bench makes predictions difficult. Carpenter was a 5-4 decision recognizing privacy interests in detailed records of your whereabouts over time, but membership has changed since then. Some justices have shown skepticism toward expansive government surveillance; others have been more deferential to law enforcement’s investigative needs.
The decision will determine whether constitutional protections against general warrants and unreasonable searches apply with meaningful force to the digital tools that have become central to modern life, or whether those protections are relics of a pre-digital age that no longer constrain how the government can collect and analyze our data.
For the thousands of people whose data has been swept up in geofence warrant investigations without their knowledge, and for the millions more whose movements are continuously tracked and stored by tech companies, the answer will define what privacy means in 2026 and beyond. The decision will set the boundaries for how much power the government has to search through our digital lives when investigating crimes, and whether the Constitution’s framers’ concerns about general warrants still protect us in an age when our phones track everywhere we go.
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