The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their cellphone location data, handing down a major Fourth Amendment decision that limits the government’s ability to obtain certain digital records without a properly tailored warrant.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices found that law enforcement’s use of a geofence warrant to identify Okello Chatrie constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. The ruling overturns a lower court’s decision against Chatrie and sends the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit for further review.
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said the Supreme Court was not deciding every constitutional question surrounding the warrant itself. Instead, she explained that the appeals court must now determine whether the warrant met the Fourth Amendment’s requirements for probable cause and particularity at every stage of the search process.
“Because this is a ‘court of review, not a first view,’ the Court leaves it up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause,” Kagan wrote.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett dissented from the majority opinion.
The case stems from the 2019 robbery of a credit union in the Richmond, Virginia, suburbs. Chatrie later pleaded guilty to the crime and is serving a prison sentence of nearly 12 years.
Investigators identified him through the use of a geofence warrant, sometimes referred to as a reverse warrant. The investigative tool requires technology companies to provide information on all devices located within a designated area during a specific period of time. Authorities often rely on the technique when they have details about a crime but have not yet identified a suspect.
According to the case, investigators turned to the geofence warrant after surveillance footage showed the robbery suspect carrying and using a cellphone. Law enforcement obtained anonymized location information from devices found within a 17.5-acre radius surrounding the bank and gradually narrowed the list of possible suspects until they identified Chatrie.
Chatrie challenged the use of the cellphone location data, arguing that obtaining it violated his Fourth Amendment rights. A federal district court agreed that the search violated the Constitution but nevertheless ruled that the evidence could still be used because officers acted under the good-faith exception.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit later upheld that decision in a divided ruling, prompting the case to reach the Supreme Court.
Before the high court, the federal government argued that Chatrie did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in location records because he had voluntarily allowed Google to collect and maintain the information.
During oral arguments in April, Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin argued that Chatrie was seeking an unprecedented expansion of Fourth Amendment protections over records documenting his public movements that he had consented to Google creating and storing.
The Supreme Court rejected that position.
“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote in the majority opinion.
Monday’s ruling narrows the scope of cloud-stored data that federal authorities may lawfully obtain without first securing an individualized warrant.
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