The Supreme Court heard a landmark case that could decide whether the government can force Google to search millions of Americans without warrants naming specific suspects.
On April 27, justices heard oral argument in Chatrie v. United States, the first direct constitutional challenge to geofence warrants — a surveillance tool that lets police compel tech companies to search the location history of every device in a given area and time window, then hand over identifying information on users the government finds interesting.
The case started with a 2019 Virginia bank robbery. Police didn’t have a suspect. Instead, they asked Google to search everyone near the crime scene.
Google identified 19 devices. Police requested expanded data on nine. They ultimately de-anonymized three — one of whom was Okello Chatrie, who was convicted and sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
“The mechanism is clever, from a law enforcement perspective. It’s also precisely what the Fourth Amendment was written to prohibit.”
The Fourth Amendment was designed to stop exactly this kind of government behavior: searching the many to find the one.
The founders knew about general warrants — British instruments that authorized officers to search anyone, anywhere, for anything the crown wished to find — because those warrants had been used against them. The prohibition they wrote was specific: warrants must describe the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized.
Particularity. Probable cause. Judicial authorization.
Three requirements stated plainly in the Constitution are violated systematically whenever the government finds them inconvenient.
Geofence warrants flip that framework. They don’t start with a suspect. They start with a location and a time window, then compel a technology company to search the location history of every device in that area and return identifying information for users the government decides looks interesting.
Police searched the accounts of 19 people. They had probable cause to believe none of them individually was a criminal — that’s the point.
The warrant’s function was to generate suspicion, not act on it.
The founders called that a general warrant. The government calls it an investigative technique.
Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates argue the practice treats every smartphone owner as a potential suspect based solely on proximity to a crime scene. The tool has been used in thousands of investigations nationwide, from bank robberies to January 6 prosecutions.
The Supreme Court’s ruling could determine whether the Fourth Amendment’s protections extend to location data stored by private companies — or whether the government can treat Google’s servers as a backdoor search tool for millions of Americans’ movements.
