Supreme Court to Rule on Geofence Warrants: A Landmark Case for Digital Privacy Rights

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on Monday in a landmark case that could significantly curb the government’s ability to obtain vast amounts of digital data from device users using a single warrant. Chatrie v. The United States marks the first major Fourth Amendment case the Court has taken up since 2018, despite the rapid evolution of technology impacting privacy rights.

The case centers on geofence warrants, which compel companies like Google to disclose user data from a specific time and location. These warrants allow law enforcement to identify devices that passed through a designated area during a set window, raising critical questions about digital surveillance.

“It’s a really interesting question about a law enforcement tool that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, where you can basically look at potentially every phone, for example, that passed through a particular area in a particular window.”

Both conservative and liberal civil liberties advocates have sided with the petitioner, Okello Chatrie, leaving the U.S. government with fewer friend-of-the-court briefs in support of its position. Chatrie was convicted in 2022 for a 2019 bank robbery after police used a geofence warrant to obtain Google data from a one-hour period and 17.5-acre area, which they then refined to identify suspects.

In Congress, Democrats have expressed concerns about geofence warrants in the context of abortion rights, while Republicans have raised alarms about their use in tracking individuals linked to the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Courts have been divided on the legality of geofence warrants in Chatrie’s case.

Google has since changed its data storage practices, moving location records from the cloud to user devices. However, advocates for Chatrie argue that the case could have broader implications for other digital records, including financial data, search history, and chatbot interactions.

“We think it’s important that courts get it right and that, among other things, courts recognize that we have a property interest in many of our digital records. If the government can get those digital records without a warrant, that renders the Fourth Amendment pretty empty and we’re not secure in our privacy and traditional rights to having control of our private papers and effects.”

The U.S. government counters that Chatrie voluntarily opted into Google’s location history storage and that the collection of this data is comparable to identifying other physical markers of presence, such as tire tracks or boot prints. In its argument, the government cited the “third-party doctrine”, stating that individuals generally have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information disclosed to a third party and later shared with law enforcement.

A coalition of 32 attorneys general and several law professors have sided with the U.S. government in this case. The government’s reliance on the third-party doctrine echoes arguments made in the 2018 Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, where the Court limited the applicability of this doctrine. The decision in Chatrie v. United States could further refine the boundaries of digital privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment.