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If police want to know who was near a crime scene, they can ask Google for a list of every phone in the area—including yours. Law enforcement now uses this technique thousands of times annually, yet most Americans have no idea this is happening.
Here’s how police can track your phone location: they get what’s called a geofence warrant. The Supreme Court agreed this month to decide whether this investigative technique violates your constitutional right to privacy from unreasonable government searches. The case, Chatrie v. United States, emerged from a 2019 bank robbery in suburban Richmond, Virginia. Instead of starting with a suspect, police start with a location and work backward through masses of data to find suspects.
How One Bank Robbery Became a Constitutional Test Case
When someone robbed the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, in 2019, police asked Google for help identifying everyone in the area.
The warrant demanded location data for every device within 150 feet of the credit union during the hour surrounding the robbery. Google complied, providing an anonymized list of phones that appeared in that zone. Officers analyzed movement patterns—which devices arrived before the robbery and left after, which ones moved suspiciously—and narrowed the list to three devices of interest.
They requested more detailed information about those three devices. Eventually they obtained subscriber names and identified the phones’ owners. One was Okello Chatrie. He pleaded guilty and got nearly 12 years in prison.
But even the federal judge who handled his case agreed the search violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The evidence was allowed anyway, under a legal rule called the “good-faith exception”—basically, if a cop reasonably thought the warrant was valid, evidence can be used even if the warrant turns out to be flawed. Chatrie lost. The conviction stood.
That’s the case now before the Supreme Court.
How Geofence Warrants Work
Normal investigations start with a suspect. Detectives develop probable cause that a specific person committed an offense, then get a warrant to search that person’s home, car, or phone. The Fourth Amendment requires specificity—you have to say exactly whose stuff you’re searching and what you’re looking for.
Geofence warrants flip this entirely. Investigators start with only a spot and a time. They tell Google: give us every phone that was here during this window. Then they sift through that data—data from dozens or hundreds of people—looking for suspicious patterns.
The initial results are anonymized. Google provides device identifiers, not names. But police analyze which devices moved in ways that seem consistent with criminal activity. Rapid departure after the robbery. Unusual routes. Stopping points that match the robbery site. They cross-reference this with surveillance footage, looking for phones that might belong to people visible on camera.
The list shrinks. Hundreds become dozens become a handful.
Only then do investigators typically ask Google for subscriber information—the actual names attached to those phones. And as the Chatrie case demonstrates, they often make these follow-up requests without obtaining new judicial authorization. The original warrant said nothing about unmasking specific individuals. But they did it anyway.
If you were near that credit union—getting coffee at a nearby shop, driving past, living in an adjacent building—your data got swept into an investigation. An officer you’ve never met examined where you went, how fast you moved, whether your patterns seemed “suspicious.” You had no idea this was happening.
How This Became Routine
Law enforcement now uses these location-tracking requests thousands of times annually for a wide range of offenses—from serious violent crimes to property offenses and other investigations.
This happened quietly, with no public debate and no laws passed to regulate it. Departments discovered that these requests offered a shortcut around traditional detective work. Why spend weeks canvassing neighborhoods and interviewing witnesses when you can get a list of potential suspects from Google in days?
From law enforcement’s perspective, the tool works. It solves cases. It identifies suspects who might never have been found through conventional investigation.
These requests work because of technology Google built for a different purpose. The company’s Location History service—which users can enable to get personalized traffic information and recommendations based on where they are—maintains detailed records of where phones have been. Google stores this in a database called Sensorvault, which can be queried to find all devices present in a specific geographic boundary during a specific time period.
Google recently changed how it stores location data. The Trump administration told the Supreme Court this change would make these requests much harder to use. The Supreme Court took the case anyway, suggesting the justices think the constitutional questions matter even if Google’s current system makes these warrants harder to use.
The Fourth Amendment Problem
The Fourth Amendment says the government can’t conduct unreasonable searches. It also says warrants must be specific about exactly what’s being searched and taken. These location-tracking requests arguably violate both requirements.
Start with specificity. A traditional search warrant identifies a specific spot—”the residence at 123 Main Street”—and specific items to be seized—”evidence of drug trafficking.” Everyone knows whose privacy is being invaded: the person who lives at 123 Main Street.
A geofence warrant identifies a spot and time—but not which specific people’s data will be searched. It authorizes examining information for every person in that area, then relies on officer discretion to narrow results afterward. Defense attorneys argue this violates the rule that warrants must be specific—the warrant doesn’t say which people you’re investigating. It lets police examine hundreds of innocent people’s data without naming them first.
Then there’s reasonableness. Is a search that sweeps up innocent people’s data inherently unreasonable, even if investigators had probable cause that an offense occurred? A warrant for one home affects one family. A geofence warrant for a downtown area during business hours might affect thousands of people. That scale matters.
The government’s counterargument relies on the idea that data shared with companies like Google receives less constitutional protection because you voluntarily opted into tracking. You chose to use Google’s services. You accepted the terms. You enabled Location History. So you accepted the possibility that this data might be shared with law enforcement.
But did you? Did anyone read those terms of service and think, “I understand that if an offense happens near me, investigators will examine my movements and decide whether I look suspicious”?
Circuit Courts Disagree
Before the Supreme Court accepted this case, different federal appeals courts had ruled opposite ways about whether these location requests comply with the Fourth Amendment.
One appeals court—which covers Virginia, where Chatrie was tried—upheld his conviction. But the three judges on the panel offered different reasons. Some said accessing data isn’t even a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. Others acknowledged it was a search but found no constitutional violation. Still others invoked the good-faith exception without addressing the underlying constitutional question.
Meanwhile, another appeals court reached the opposite conclusion in a separate case, explicitly holding that these requests violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. That court focused on the specificity requirement—the warrant didn’t clearly identify which persons would be searched, making it too broad and unconstitutional.
So a geofence warrant upheld in Virginia gets struck down in Louisiana. This disagreement between courts is exactly why the Supreme Court stepped in. The justices need to set one national standard.
For years, courts approved and denied these requests without clear legal standards. Prosecutors used data obtained through tools of uncertain constitutionality. Defendants were convicted based on evidence that might or might not have been legally obtained, depending on which circuit they happened to be tried in.
The Capitol Riot Prosecutions
Police obtained geofence warrants to identify individuals present at the Capitol during the riot, then cross-referenced that data with social media activity, financial records, and other investigative tools to identify and prosecute defendants.
From law enforcement’s perspective, this demonstrated the tool’s value in solving complex cases involving large numbers of participants. Civil liberties advocates saw it as an alarming example of mass surveillance—tracking people for being somewhere during a political event.
The Capitol prosecutions made the implications visceral. Suddenly people could imagine themselves swept into one of these requests—not because they committed an offense, but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Attending a protest. Walking past a building. Living near a scene.
The company X (formerly Twitter) submitted a statement to the Supreme Court arguing that these requests force companies to betray user trust by providing data that users never expected would be shared with law enforcement this way. When you enable tracking to get better traffic directions, you’re not consenting to become an investigative subject if an offense happens nearby.
What Happens Next
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments sometime in 2026—likely spring or early fall. The justices will ask whether these location requests count as “searches” under the Fourth Amendment, whether they meet specificity requirements, what geographic scope is permissible, and whether the good-faith exception protects evidence obtained through warrants issued before any ruling.
A decision is expected by June 2026 if the case is heard in the current term, though it could stretch into 2027.
If the justices rule these requests unconstitutional, investigators lose a tool they’ve increasingly relied upon. Investigations slow down. Departments return to traditional methods: reviewing surveillance footage manually, canvassing neighborhoods, interviewing witnesses. Investigators would need to identify suspects through other means before accessing their information. The traditional investigative model—probable cause focused on specific individuals—gets restored.
If the justices uphold these requests, investigators gain clear legal authority to continue and expand their use. But even a ruling in favor of law enforcement might impose limitations: narrow geographic zones, short time windows, mandatory procedures to protect innocent people’s data, heightened scrutiny from judges before approving these requests.
The decision will also affect thousands of pending criminal cases that relied on this type of evidence. Defense attorneys will argue that evidence from unconstitutional requests shouldn’t be allowed in court and convictions should be overturned. Prosecutors will argue the good-faith exception protects evidence obtained before the ruling, when officers reasonably believed the requests were valid.
The Broader Context
These location-tracking requests represent a particularly acute version of a broader challenge: how to balance law enforcement’s legitimate need to solve cases against citizens’ constitutional right to privacy when technology makes possible surveillance the framers of the Constitution never imagined.
The Fourth Amendment was written in an era when searches meant physically entering someone’s home. Tracking meant following someone on foot or horseback. The idea that the government could obtain records of everywhere you’ve been for the past year, or identify everyone present in a geographic area during a specific hour, would have seemed like science fiction.
In a 2018 case called Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court addressed a related question, ruling that investigators generally need a warrant to access cell tower records. But Carpenter involved accessing data about a single suspect, not a reverse geographic search of multiple people. How that ruling applies to these location requests isn’t clear yet.
Chatrie v. United States will set constitutional rules for how police can use digital surveillance in criminal investigations—not just for these location requests, but potentially for the broader category of searches based on where people are and investigations that start with a spot instead of a suspect.
As technology evolves and companies accumulate ever more granular data about people’s movements, the rules set by this case will apply to many other types of surveillance tools not yet invented.
For ordinary Americans, the practical implications are straightforward: being near a scene could have investigative consequences you never anticipated. Not because investigators suspect you of wrongdoing, but simply because your phone’s history was captured in one of these requests. That data could be examined by law enforcement, shared across agencies, potentially kept in databases long after the original investigation ends.
The question before the Supreme Court is whether the Fourth Amendment permits this, or whether it requires a return to investigative methods focused on specific individuals rather than mass surveillance of geographic zones.
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