Supreme Court Hears Geofence Warrant Case

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Monday in Chatrie v. United States, a case examining whether geofence warrants used by police to obtain cellphone location data from tech companies violate the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. The dispute stems from a May 2019 armed robbery of a credit union in a Richmond, Virginia, suburb, where authorities identified suspect Okello Chatrie through data from Google.

Chatrie, who pleaded guilty to the crime while reserving his right to challenge the evidence, is serving a nearly 12-year prison sentence. Surveillance footage showed the robber holding a cellphone at the credit union, where about $195,000 was stolen at gunpoint. After exhausting other leads, police obtained a state court warrant directing Google to provide anonymized location data for devices within a 150-meter radius of the scene during a roughly two-hour window. Google complied in steps: first with anonymized data, then with information on a narrower set of devices, and finally with subscriber details for three accounts, including Chatrie's. Further searches of his residence uncovered a pistol, robbery demand notes, and cash banded by a...