Chatrie v. United States  The Project for Privacy & Surveillance Accountability is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the Fourth Amendment allows law enforcement to use geofence warrants to retroactively track the movements of everyone in a defined area. These so-called “reverse warrants” involve law enforcement’s request for information from technology companies – like Google, Apple, Snapchat, Lyft, or Uber – that allows them to identify potential suspects in a crime. This case began with a robbery in 2019 of $200,000 from a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Detectives soon hit a dead end in a search for suspects. So they served Google with a geofence warrant to provide certain cellphone data for everyone who passed through a circumscribed area around the credit union. As a result, people suspected of no crime had their personal information examined by police. Targets included residents of a nursing home, diners and wait staff at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant, and guests who had checked into a Hampton Inn. The search led to the arrest and guilty plea of one Okello T. Chatrie, who now seeks to exclude this evidence on constitutional grounds. Federal Judge Mary Hannah Lauck noted that because Google logs cellphone users’ location 240 times a day, technology gives police “an almost unlimited pool from which to seek location data” in a broad area in which everyone has “effectively been tailed.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc to review a divided panel decision, held that this geofence warrant did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court is now set to take up this question. In our brief, we are telling the Court that such dragnet surveillance is fundamentally incompatible with the Fourth Amendment’s core protections. Geofence Warrants Are “Digital General Warrants” One of the primary abuses that motivated the Founders to create the Fourth Amendment was the use in colonial times of general warrants – broad search authorizations that allowed the King’s agents to rummage through private lives and property without individualized suspicion. Geofence warrants are their modern equivalent. Instead of naming a person or place to be searched based on probable cause, geofence warrants similarly authorize the government to sift through massive location databases to identify people who might be worth investigating. PPSA told the court that these warrants invert the constitutional order – everyone becomes a suspect first, and probable cause, if it appears at all, comes afterward. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter Decision Was Not a Narrow Exception Lower courts have struggled to apply the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in long-term cellphone location records, even when those records are held by a third party. In Chatrie, the Fourth Circuit treated Carpenter as a narrow exception limited to long-term tracking of a single suspect. PPSA demonstrates that this take misreads the case entirely. Carpenter reaffirmed a broader principle: Fourth Amendment protections must preserve the level of privacy that existed at the nation’s founding, even as technology evolves. The fact that data is held by a third party – or that the government demands only a “slice” of a much larger tracking database – does not erase reasonable expectations of privacy. A two-hour window into a comprehensive location history can still reveal intensely private information – where someone worships, seeks medical care, attends political meetings, or simply lives their daily life. PPSA is telling the Court that the privacy concerns raised by geofence warrants are even more severe than those in Carpenter, because they involve mass surveillance of unknown and unsuspected individuals. This is not targeted policing. It is suspicionless data mining. Your Privacy Rights Depend on Where You Live Courts across the country are sharply divided on this issue. The Fourth and Eleventh Circuits have suggested that geofence searches may not even trigger the Fourth Amendment. By contrast, the Fifth Circuit has correctly recognized that geofence warrants are unconstitutional in nearly all circumstances because they lack particularity and probable cause. That split leaves Americans’ privacy rights dependent on geography, and in the case of Texas, whether state or federal proceedings are involved. PPSA urges the Supreme Court to step in now, before this powerful surveillance tool becomes permanently normalized. The Constitution Must Keep Up with Technology As PPSA warns, geofence warrants are only the beginning. We told the High Court: “Fourth Amendment protections are not categorically lost when a person shares or stores his data with a third party while maintaining reasonable expectations and assurances of privacy. The Court should … prevent a contrary understanding of Carpenter from continuing to erode Americans’ privacy – especially now, as third-party storage becomes more ubiquitous and artificial intelligence becomes powerful enough to piece together intimate information from seemingly innocuous details about a target’s life.” The data that this practice puts at risk is not limited to location. The government has used other forms of these “reverse search warrants” to extract other private data, such as identifying anyone who has searched for a specific phrase or forcing commercial genealogy companies to allow access to their DNA databases. Advances in artificial intelligence already allow law enforcement to infer locations from photos and videos, even when no geolocation data is attached. Without firm constitutional limits, today’s location dragnet could become tomorrow’s visual surveillance dragnet. The Fourth Amendment’s precise wording is designed to prevent unchecked surveillance. PPSA’s calls on the Supreme Court to reaffirm that Americans do not surrender their constitutional rights simply by carrying a cellphone. Comments are closed.
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