The Supreme Court said it will take up a case challenging the constitutionality of “geofence warrants,” which police use to try to identify suspects by poring over cellphones in the vicinity of a crime.
The case, which the court accepted Friday, could become a major test of the Fourth Amendment in a world of expanding technological tools to track people wherever they take their electronic devices.
In the case before the justices, police obtained a warrant asking Google for all of its location history data within 150 feet of a bank robbery. That request is known as a geofence.
Police went back to Google twice — without getting new warrants — to hone in on suspicious devices and then to obtain the identities of owners of three of them.
That led police to Okello Chatrie, who is the plaintiff challenging the warrant, asking that the evidence obtained from it be suppressed.
“Geofence warrants are a powerful law enforcement tool. At the same time, they raise significant Fourth Amendment concerns,” said Adam Unikowski, the chief lawyer for Mr. Chatrie.
He said the warrants represent a massive fishing expedition, rather than the particularized circumstances demanded by the Constitution.
The Trump administration had told the justices not to take the case.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said Mr. Chatrie had opted in to Google’s location history tracking in the first place.
He also compared the location data to any other “marker” a criminal might leave at the scene of a crime, which investigators are free to use.
Besides, Mr. Sauer said, this type of geofence warrant would no longer be possible. He said Google changed its services a few years back so that location data is now only stored locally on a device, not kept centrally by the company.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously heard the case, upheld the warrant — but judges offered wildly varying reasons.
Some of the judges said a geofence request wasn’t even a search under the Constitution. Others said it was a search. Still another ducked that question altogether, just ruling that the government acted in “good-faith” and so the evidence shouldn’t be suppressed.
Tech companies have weighed in, urging the justices to clear up the law.
X, formerly Twitter, said the justices should consider the contractual promises the companies make to protect data when they rule.
