DOJ Geofencing Technique Faces Supreme Court Review

The Supreme Court will consider whether geofencing technique violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Objective Facts

Virginia police used geofencing to tap into Google's databases to identify Okello Chatrie as a suspect in a 2019 bank robbery where $195,000 was stolen. The technique allows government to seek a warrant requiring tech companies to search their data to identify users within a geographic area at the time of a crime. The technique is under legal scrutiny because of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches unless police obtain a warrant from a neutral magistrate aimed at obtaining specific evidence of a crime. The geofence warrant police served on Google found Chatrie's cellphone among a handful of devices near the bank at the time it was robbed, and now the Supreme Court will decide whether such warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.

Left-Leaning Perspective

Left-leaning privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations, including the ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), have mounted strong opposition to geofence warrants. Tom McBrien, counsel with EPIC, argues within his amicus brief that private tech companies have limited oversight and accountability, and law enforcement is relying on technology such as geofencing that often provides flawed data insights that can lead to unlawful arrests, stating 'Companies are exploiting the lack of consumer data privacy protections and simply providing law enforcement with individual, personal data that is overly broad, with no processes and oversight that may violate the Fourth Amendment of citizens.' The ACLU, ACLU of Virginia, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law filed an amicus brief arguing 'Geofence searches are unconstitutional general warrants that fail the Fourth Amendment's probable cause, particularity, and judicial review requirements, and they should be categorically rejected by courts.' Their core argument centers on Fourth Amendment violations and the invasiveness of the technique. Chatrie's attorneys note in their Supreme Court filings that geofence warrants 'present serious privacy concerns' because the government can use them to determine when someone makes visits that they might want to keep discreet—for example to a plastic surgeon or psychiatrist. Law professors who study digital surveillance wrote to the court that a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could 'unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches.' Privacy advocates argue the technique casts far too wide a net, investigating innocent people based solely on their physical location. Left-leaning coverage has focused heavily on the dragnet nature of these searches and the lack of judicial safeguards. What the left's coverage de-emphasizes is the government's argument that users voluntarily opted into location tracking and that law enforcement's focused subsequent steps narrowed the investigation significantly. The left also generally downplays law enforcement's successful use of geofence warrants in high-profile cases, including identifying January 6 Capitol attackers and solving murders.

Right-Leaning Perspective

Law enforcement advocates and the Trump administration's Justice Department have presented a forceful defense of geofence warrants, emphasizing their practical investigative success and arguing they comply with Fourth Amendment requirements when a judicial warrant is obtained. Prosecutors credit the warrants with helping crack cold cases and other crimes where surveillance cameras did not reveal suspects' faces or license plates. Investigators used geofence warrants to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who attacked the Capitol in the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and to search for those who planted pipe bombs outside Democratic and Republican party headquarters, with police also crediting these warrants with helping identify suspects in killings in several states including California, Georgia and North Carolina. The government's legal position centers on the third-party doctrine and voluntary disclosure. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer stresses that, unlike a general warrant, the warrant in this case did not give law enforcement officials 'free rein to rummage through Google's database,' arguing instead 'the warrant simply directed Google to locate and turn over the necessary information, such that investigators themselves saw only a minuscule slice of data in Google's database,' and positing that Chatrie's 'arguments seem to imply that no geofence warrant, of any sort, could ever be executed.' The government emphasizes that Chatrie did not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in his location data, both because he 'affirmatively opted to allow Google to collect, store, and use' it and because the warrant merely sought information that would have been 'visible to anyone near' him at the time of the robbery. Right-leaning coverage emphasizes practical law enforcement success while downplaying concerns about innocent people caught in the geofence dragnet. The emphasis on obtaining judicial warrants and narrowing focus in subsequent steps suggests the right views the current process as having adequate judicial oversight, whereas the left views the initial geofence warrant as inherently lacking particularity.

Deep Dive

The geofence warrant case sits at a critical juncture where Fourth Amendment doctrine must grapple with the unprecedented power of digital location data. Historically, the Fourth Amendment's framers were concerned with physical searches of homes and papers; modern technology now allows government to map nearly everyone's movements with far greater precision than even recent precedents contemplated. The 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision split the difference—requiring a warrant for detailed cell-site location information but leaving open questions about other forms of location data. The government's argument that opting into Google's service forfeits privacy protection relies on the 'third-party doctrine,' a legal framework dating to 1976 bank records cases that many legal scholars argue ill-fits digital data that reveals intimate details of daily life (visits to religious services, medical facilities, protests, therapists' offices). The left is essentially arguing that Carpenter principles should extend to even more precise location data collected at scale, while the right contends that voluntary opt-in distinguishes Google's service from the automatic cell-tower tracking Carpenter addressed. The government's position—that it merely received location data investigators had narrowly targeted through a multi-step process—has some legitimacy given that the initial geofence warrant was narrow (150-meter radius, 30 minutes before/after the crime) and investigators had to request additional data and names in separate steps. However, privacy advocates counter that the initial warrant itself, by casting a net to identify everyone near the crime scene with no prior suspicion, constitutes the constitutionally problematic search. Federal courts have split: the Fifth Circuit ruled geofence warrants are unconstitutional general warrants; the Fourth Circuit (in its initial panel ruling) found no Fourth Amendment violation based on lack of reasonable expectation of privacy, and the en banc Fourth Circuit simply affirmed the conviction on other grounds without resolving the constitutional question. What happens next matters enormously. If the Supreme Court sides with privacy advocates and rules geofence warrants categorically unconstitutional, law enforcement loses a tool it credits with solving January 6 Capitol cases, murders, and cold cases. If the Court upholds them without strong safeguards, as the Trump administration advocates, it opens the door to the kind of bulk location surveillance that characterizes authoritarian regimes. The middle ground—geofence warrants permissible with stricter probable cause requirements or temporal/geographic limits—remains possible but would require the Court to write a sophisticated opinion distinguishing Carpenter rather than simply applying existing doctrine.

OBJ SPEAKING

Create StoryTimelinesVoter ToolsRegional AnalysisAll StoriesCommunity PicksUSWorldPoliticsBusinessHealthEntertainmentTechnologyAbout

DOJ Geofencing Technique Faces Supreme Court Review

The Supreme Court will consider whether geofencing technique violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Apr 26, 2026· Updated Apr 27, 2026
What's Going On

Virginia police used geofencing to tap into Google's databases to identify Okello Chatrie as a suspect in a 2019 bank robbery where $195,000 was stolen. The technique allows government to seek a warrant requiring tech companies to search their data to identify users within a geographic area at the time of a crime. The technique is under legal scrutiny because of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches unless police obtain a warrant from a neutral magistrate aimed at obtaining specific evidence of a crime. The geofence warrant police served on Google found Chatrie's cellphone among a handful of devices near the bank at the time it was robbed, and now the Supreme Court will decide whether such warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.

Left says: Civil libertarians say geofences amount to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones happened to be in the vicinity of a crime.
Right says: Prosecutors credit geofence warrants with helping crack cold cases and other crimes where surveillance cameras did not reveal suspects' faces or license plates.
✓ Common Ground
Some voices across the political spectrum, including the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, acknowledge that the court should avoid an all-or-nothing approach in the Chatrie case, suggesting a middle ground may exist between total prohibition and unrestricted use.
There appears to be agreement among various stakeholders that the legal framework governing geofence warrants is genuinely unsettled, with the government arguing that the Carpenter precedent is inapplicable because Google's location data are 'opt-in,' while privacy advocates argue the unprecedented precision of the data demands stronger protections.
Chatrie's attorneys and various court commentators note that lower courts have split on geofence warrants' constitutionality, and there is shared recognition that private businesses should not be deciding Fourth Amendment policy alone, with Chatrie's petition asserting 'This Court — not a private business — should decide how the Fourth Amendment works in the context of geofence warrants.'
Objective Deep Dive

The geofence warrant case sits at a critical juncture where Fourth Amendment doctrine must grapple with the unprecedented power of digital location data. Historically, the Fourth Amendment's framers were concerned with physical searches of homes and papers; modern technology now allows government to map nearly everyone's movements with far greater precision than even recent precedents contemplated. The 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision split the difference—requiring a warrant for detailed cell-site location information but leaving open questions about other forms of location data. The government's argument that opting into Google's service forfeits privacy protection relies on the 'third-party doctrine,' a legal framework dating to 1976 bank records cases that many legal scholars argue ill-fits digital data that reveals intimate details of daily life (visits to religious services, medical facilities, protests, therapists' offices). The left is essentially arguing that Carpenter principles should extend to even more precise location data collected at scale, while the right contends that voluntary opt-in distinguishes Google's service from the automatic cell-tower tracking Carpenter addressed.

The government's position—that it merely received location data investigators had narrowly targeted through a multi-step process—has some legitimacy given that the initial geofence warrant was narrow (150-meter radius, 30 minutes before/after the crime) and investigators had to request additional data and names in separate steps. However, privacy advocates counter that the initial warrant itself, by casting a net to identify everyone near the crime scene with no prior suspicion, constitutes the constitutionally problematic search. Federal courts have split: the Fifth Circuit ruled geofence warrants are unconstitutional general warrants; the Fourth Circuit (in its initial panel ruling) found no Fourth Amendment violation based on lack of reasonable expectation of privacy, and the en banc Fourth Circuit simply affirmed the conviction on other grounds without resolving the constitutional question.

What happens next matters enormously. If the Supreme Court sides with privacy advocates and rules geofence warrants categorically unconstitutional, law enforcement loses a tool it credits with solving January 6 Capitol cases, murders, and cold cases. If the Court upholds them without strong safeguards, as the Trump administration advocates, it opens the door to the kind of bulk location surveillance that characterizes authoritarian regimes. The middle ground—geofence warrants permissible with stricter probable cause requirements or temporal/geographic limits—remains possible but would require the Court to write a sophisticated opinion distinguishing Carpenter rather than simply applying existing doctrine.

◈ Tone Comparison

Left-leaning coverage and advocacy materials use terms like 'Orwellian,' 'fishing expeditions,' and 'dragnet' to evoke dystopian surveillance concerns and mass invasion of privacy. Right-leaning coverage emphasizes 'powerful technological tool,' concrete results, and solved crimes, while minimizing privacy impacts by noting investigators reviewed only a 'minuscule slice' of available data.