The Supreme Court agreed to consider whether search warrants collecting location data of individuals near crime scenes are constitutional. The Court granted the petition in Chatrie v. United States in an unsigned order.
According to a case summary, the matter surrounds an incident where law enforcement obtained a geofence warrant “seeking anonymized location data for every device within 150 meters of the location of a bank robbery within one hour” of a robbery. Without seeking an additional warrant, law enforcement sought information “about the movements of certain devices for a longer, two-hour period, and Google complied with that request as well.” Without seeking another warrant, law enforcement then “requested de-anonymized subscriber information for three devices.” One of the devices belonged to Okello Chatrie.
The Court will address whether the geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment and whether the exclusionary rule should apply to evidence taken from the geofence warrant.
Lawyers for Chatrie wrote in the Supreme Court petition that a federal district court previously concluded that “geofence warrants intrude into the private lives of many Americans who may never have a chance to contest the incursion.”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court not to take the case. He wrote that “Google has been the primary recipient of geofence warrants, because for several years it maintained a Location History database called Sensorvault that stored cellphone location information associated with specific users at a sufficiently granular level to enable Google to respond to such warrants.” Sauer further noted that a user must “choose to opt into the Location History service in order for Google to track the user’s location history.”
Geofencing data was also used to pinpoint individuals participating in the January 6 protest.
The FBI initially requested Google to “identify all devices in a 4-acre area” surrounding the US Capitol, to which Google located 5,723 devices that were affiliated with the 4-acre geofence. To narrow their search, the FBI inquired into the devices that were “present at the Capitol from 12 pm to 12:15 pm on January 6, and from 9 pm to 9:15 pm,” as these phones most likely belonged to congressional members and authorities, removing 205 people from the original list of 5,723 people. FBI officials then sought the phone numbers, Google accounts, and email addresses of those detected within the geofence, flagging those who deleted their location history from January 6 to January 13.
