AP: Geofence warrants to be tested in VA bank robbery case

AP: Geofence warrants to be tested in Virginia bank robbery case (“Surveillance video gave authorities a lead, showing a man holding a cellphone outside the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian on May 20, 2019. So like a growing number of law enforcement agencies, they got a court-approved ‘geofence’ search warrant, seeking the location history of any devices in the area at the time. Google is served with the vast majority of these warrants because it stores information from millions of devices in a massive database known as Sensorvault…..Now, geofence warrants are getting their first significant court challenge. Lawyers for Okello Chatrie want a federal judge in Richmond to suppress the warrant that led to his arrest for the bank heist….Chatrie’s lawyers say all the evidence should be suppressed because it flowed from the geofence warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. ‘It is the digital equivalent of searching every home in the neighborhood of a reported burglary, or searching the bags of every person walking along Broadway because of a theft in Times Square,’ Chatrie’s lawyers wrote.”)