The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case that could determine whether law enforcement can force Google to identify everyone near a crime scene, raising questions about Fourth Amendment protections in the age of smartphones and cloud-stored data.
The case began with a 2019 armed bank robbery at the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia. A gunman told the teller he had accomplices holding her family hostage, ordered the manager to empty the safe, and walked out with $195,000. He eluded police for months.
Investigators then sought a “geofence warrant,” demanding that Google search its location history database and identify every user near the crime scene within an hour of the robbery. The dragnet swept up people at nearby homes, a restaurant, and a church. Google ultimately identified 19 accounts, narrowed the list to nine, and handed over subscriber information for three. One belonged to Okello Chatrie, who was convicted and sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
Chatrie challenged the warrant as a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search. The case now sits before the nation’s highest court.
The Trump administration defended geofence warrants, arguing Chatrie surrendered his privacy objections when he agreed to Google’s terms of service and chose to enable location tracking.
Chief Justice John Roberts appeared receptive to that framing, at least in part. “The only reason the government has access to this information is you decided to make it public,” he said. “If you don’t want them to peer into your window, you can close your window, or the shades.”
But Roberts also raised concerns about broader surveillance potential. He asked what would stop the government from using the same technique to compile a list of everyone attending a particular church or political gathering.
Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin acknowledged that churches could potentially be subject to such warrants. He cited church shootings as a scenario where that capability might be necessary, and said it falls on users to disable location services if they don’t want to be tracked.
Roberts was unpersuaded. “They want to have a catalog of the people who go to a particular location,” he said. “And it seems to me that that’s a realistic problem.”
Chatrie’s attorney, Adam Unikowsky, argued that accepting the government’s position would gut Fourth Amendment protections for anything stored digitally. “That is really the end of the Fourth Amendment for any private document you’re storing with Google,” he told the justices.
The case builds on two prior Supreme Court decisions. In Riley v. California (2014), the court ruled unanimously that police need a warrant to search a cell phone seized during an arrest. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), it ruled that gathering a suspect’s location history constitutes a search requiring a warrant.
Monday’s case flips the question: investigators here didn’t know who they were looking for and used location data to narrow down suspects from a crowd.
