Facts of the Case
Okello Chatrie was arrested in connection with the armed robbery of a bank in Richmond, Virginia, where an individual entered the Call Federal Credit Union, threatened employees and patrons with a handgun, and escaped with $195,000. The robbery was captured by surveillance footage, which showed the perpetrator appearing to talk on a cellphone. Lacking viable leads, Detective Joshua Hylton applied for a “geofence warrant” in June 2019. This novel form of warrant compelled Google to provide location data for all devices that had been near the robbery site within a one-hour window around the time of the crime. The geofence specified a 150-meter radius centered on the bank, encompassing not only the crime scene but also public streets, private residences, a hotel, a church, and a restaurant.
Google responded with anonymized location data of devices within the geofence during the specified time. The government then requested two additional sets of data from Google: (1) expanded location data from nine of the original nineteen users, covering movements outside the geofence over a longer timeframe, and (2) identifying information for three of those users. One account belonged to Chatrie. Based on this data, law enforcement identified him as the suspect, arrested him, and charged him in federal court.
Chatrie moved to suppress the location data obtained through the geofence warrant, arguing that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia held that the warrant likely violated the Fourth Amendment but declined to suppress the evidence under the good-faith exception. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed the district court’s denial of the suppression motion. While the panel sharply disagreed both on whether a Fourth Amendment search had occurred and whether the warrant was constitutionally valid, all judges agreed that any defect was ultimately excused under the good-faith exception.
Questions
Did the execution of the geofence warrant violate the Fourth Amendment?
Conclusions
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When law enforcement uses a geofence warrant — a court order requiring a tech company to produce location data for all cell phones within a defined geographic area near the time of a crime — that process constitutes a Fourth Amendment “search,” meaning police must obtain a valid warrant supported by probable cause and describing the search with particularity. Justice Elena Kagan authored the 5-4 majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The Fourth Amendment’s core purpose is to prevent arbitrary government surveillance of individuals’ private lives. Under Carpenter v. United States (2018), accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) — records showing which cell towers a phone pinged — constitutes a search because people retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Google’s Location History data triggers even stronger privacy protections than CSLI did in Carpenter. Location History pinpoints a phone’s position within 20 meters (compared to CSLI’s sectors spanning up to four square miles), logs location every two minutes for a daily average of 720 data points versus 101, and can even identify which floor of a building someone occupies. Like CSLI, Location History allows police to retrospectively reconstruct anyone’s movements at any location with the click of a button — the kind of “tireless and absolute surveillance” the Fourth Amendment was designed to block. Moreover, Location History is more personally the user’s own than CSLI ever was: users consult, edit, and rely on it as a personal travel journal, not merely as an invisible byproduct of carrier operations.
Two government counterarguments fail. First, the government argued that accessing only two hours of location data is too brief to trigger Fourth Amendment protection. That argument misreads the law: the Fourth Amendment applies wherever it applies, regardless of the quantity of information obtained, and even short-term monitoring can expose deeply private associations — visits to medical offices, religious gatherings, or legal consultations. Second, the government invoked the third-party doctrine — the principle that individuals lose privacy rights in information voluntarily shared with outside parties. Location History data does not fit that doctrine. Google users do not share their movements with Google in any meaningful sense; the data generates automatically as a byproduct of ordinary smartphone use, often after Google pressures users to enable the service with warnings that their devices will not “work correctly” without it, and without disclosing the data’s precision or its availability to law enforcement. Treating every smartphone app as a voluntary privacy waiver would hollow out the Fourth Amendment entirely. Finding a search occurred does not end the case, however, because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches. The lower court must now determine whether each step of this unusual, multi-stage warrant satisfied the requirements of probable cause and particularity.
Justice Jackson concurred (joined by Justice Sotomayor), arguing the majority should have gone further and held that the second and third steps of the geofence warrant already violated the Fourth Amendment by delegating to police officers — rather than a neutral magistrate — the discretion to decide which users’ data to access with no written criteria to guide them.
Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred in the judgment only, arguing the majority should have abandoned the Katz “reasonable expectation of privacy” framework entirely and instead held that Location History qualifies as Chatrie’s personal “effect” under the Fourth Amendment’s text, making the government’s search of it unconstitutional on straightforward property-rights grounds.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented (joined in part by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett), arguing the Court should have dismissed the case as improvidently granted because the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule would bar suppression regardless of the Fourth Amendment ruling, rendering the majority opinion purely advisory; on the merits, he argued Carpenter’s reasoning did not extend to two hours of location data centered on a public place that users voluntarily enabled.
Justice Barrett dissented, agreeing with Justice Alito’s merits analysis that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in data about his public movements that he voluntarily disclosed to Google.
