Police must obtain a warrant when seeking sweep of cellphone location data, Supreme Court rules
The Supreme Court is seen here on June 25.
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the use of a “geofence warrant” to capture location data from cell phones in search of a robbery suspect constituted a search for Fourth Amendment purposes, a decision that means officers will have to obtain a warrant to access such data in the future.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for a majority that included both conservative and liberal justices. The court divided 6-3, with three of the court’s conservatives dissenting.
At a time when Americans store vast quantities of personal data in servers controlled by companies, the case raised thorny questions about the ability of police to access that information. In the end, the court steered out of the case with a relatively limited decision that will effectively require police to obtain a warrant when they’re requesting location information from a geolocation database.
“The Fourth Amendment must, as ever, protect against unjustified governmental intrusion on the privacy of the individual,” Kagan wrote.
A Virginia man, Okello Chatrie, appealed to the Supreme Court after police used the procedure to identify him as a suspect in a 2019 bank robbery. After their investigation went cold, police served Google with a geofence warrant to find a handful of people whose cellphones pegged them within 300 meters of the bank at the time of the robbery. Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea and reserved the right to appeal over the sweeping warrant.
The Supreme Court on Monday didn’t resolve Chatrie’s case. After all, the police in Chatrie’s case did, in fact, obtain a warrant. Instead, the majority concluded only that a warrant was necessary and then charged the lower courts with assessing whether the search police conducted in his case was consistent with the Fourth Amendment.
Writing in dissent, Justice Samuel Alito described the court’s opinion as an “irresponsible escapade.”
“Although today’s decision will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine, not one iota of the majority opinion will affect the outcome of this case,” Alito wrote. “The court knows this and does not claim otherwise. Indeed, by refusing to review the one question that could have at least theoretically given Chatrie some hope of relief, the court carefully set the stage for its planned performance: striking a pose as a great champion of privacy in the digital age.”
The Fourth Amendment not only requires police to obtain a warrant for searches but demands that the warrant be “particularized,” that is, specific enough that it’s not effectively a fishing expedition for police. Chatrie’s attorneys argued that the warrant was not particularized in part because it required Google to parse through location data for millions of people to identify the small subset that were in the vicinity of the bank at the time of the crime.
“The potential for abuse is breathtaking,” Chatrie’s lawyers argued. “The government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally, or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there.”
Police said Chatrie passed a note urging a bank teller in 2019 to “hand over all the cash” and demanded “at least 100k and nobody will get hurt and your family will be set free.”
After police identified Chatrie, authorities executed federal search warrants and found “robbery-style demand notes” in his bedroom, nearly $100,000 in cash and a 9 mm pistol. Police say Chatrie confessed to the robbery and was ultimately sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
The Richmond-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him, holding that the warrant didn’t constitute a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes. After all, the court reasoned, when people allow tech companies to collect data they generally do so voluntarily. It is an argument that the Justice Department, which is defending the warrants, relied on heavily.
Chatrie “took no steps to protect his location from disclosure, such as pausing the Location History feature he had enabled or adjusting, deactivating, or forgoing his cellphone during his crime,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court.
The location data at issue in Chatrie’s case can identify a person’s location within three meters every two minutes.
But Chatrie’s attorneys argue that the logic doesn’t apply to his case, in part because of a 2018 Supreme Court precedent. In that case, Carpenter v. US, a divided court ruled that law enforcement generally needs to establish probable cause before accessing cellphone tower data to identify the movements of suspects. If authorities need a warrant to get cellphone tower data, Chatrie’s attorneys said, then surely they also must obtain one to get data that is far more reliable.
Google, which had received the majority of the warrants, changed its policy to shift how the data is stored.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
