Supreme Court Curbs Geofence Warrants in 6-3 Chatrie Ruling

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that police use of a 'geofence' warrant, the kind that asks a tech company to hand over a list of every device that pinged a given area at a given time, is a search under the Fourth Amendment and therefore needs a warrant supported by probable cause. TechCrunch's writeup frames it as a major privacy win, and the SCOTUSblog summary underlines that the court explicitly treated the demand for that data as a search.

The case came out of a 2019 credit union robbery in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. Okello Chatrie, now serving nearly twelve years after pleading guilty, was identified after investigators served a geofence request covering the area around the bank at the time of the crime. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan held that 'an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information,' even from a third-party tech company. The opinion treats this as a close cousin of the 2018 Carpenter ruling, and rejects stretching the third-party doctrine to cover detailed location histories. Kagan also wrote that 'a new technology should not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the Government.'

What the ruling does not do is ban geofence warrants. It requires probable cause, lets investigators narrow the data they request, and leaves Chatrie's own sentence intact for now because earlier courts ruled the evidence was collected in good faith. Appeals courts will revisit whether the original warrant cleared the new bar. Justice Gorsuch's concurrence went further, describing Chatrie's location history as 'his personal property.' Justice Alito, joined by Thomas and Barrett, dissented and warned the decision 'will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine.'

For anyone building or buying products downstream of bulk location data, the practical question shifts from whether law enforcement can get this data to under what showing. The honest caveat is what the reporting does not yet give you: the opinion concerns data held by the originating tech company, and it leaves open how the same principle will apply to commercial location feeds sold by third-party brokers. The ACLU called the decision 'critical protection against invasive and overbroad government searches.' The forward question is whether this Fourth Amendment logic, now anchored to a Supreme Court majority, gets extended to that broker market next.