{"id":64328,"date":"2026-06-29T10:09:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T15:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=64328"},"modified":"2026-06-29T11:42:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T16:42:05","slug":"scotus-geofence-warrant-governed-by-carpenter-and-is-a-search-remanded-for-resolution-of-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=64328","title":{"rendered":"SCOTUS: Geofence warrant governed by Carpenter and is a search; remanded for resolution of issues"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A geofence warrant is a search because it captures location data. The mere collection of private data on the phone is not intended to be shared with third parties; essentially, a cell phone user has no control over that at all. The case is remanded, however, to the Fourth Circuit to consider how the various steps of the warrant process should be applied. Chatrie v. United States<\/a>, 609 U.S. —, No. 25\u2013112 (U.S. June 29, 2026). The syllabus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie\u2019s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information. Pp. 10\u201333.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(a) The Fourth Amendment protects individuals\u2019 reasonable expectations of privacy, and governmental \u201cintrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search.\u201d Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 304. The Amendment\u2019s \u201cbasic purpose\u201d is \u201cto safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by governmental officials,\u201d id., at 303, and it was designed \u201cto place obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance,\u201d United States v. Di Re, 332 U.S. 581, 595. Pp. 10\u201329.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(1) In Carpenter, this Court held that accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) constitutes a Fourth Amendment search because \u201cindividuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements,\u201d 585 U.S., at 310. The Court reasoned that CSLI provides a \u201cdetailed\u201d and \u201cencyclopedic\u201d portrait of a person\u2019s whereabouts, id., at 309, and, with that, \u201can intimate window into a person\u2019s life,\u201d id., at 311. Because people \u201ccompulsively carry\u201d their cell phones \u201call the time,\u201d the Court explained, a cell phone \u201ctracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner,\u201d and thus \u201cfaithfully follows\u201d him not only through \u201cpublic thoroughfares [but] into private residences, doctor\u2019s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales.\u201d Ibid. The Court further observed that the \u201cnewfound tracking capacity\u201d that CSLI gives the police \u201cruns against everyone\u201d\u2014not just those \u201cunder investigation\u201d\u2014and \u201ctravel[s] back in time,\u201d making possible a form of surveillance that would have been unknown prior to the digital age, id., at 311\u2013312. Carpenter accordingly held that \u201c[a]llowing government access to cell-site records contravenes\u201d expectations of privacy. Id., at 311. Pp. 13\u201315.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(2) Everything Carpenter relied on to find that law enforcement officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they accessed CSLI records applies as well or better to the police\u2019s accessing of Location History data. First, Location History provides an even more fine tuned picture of a person\u2019s movements, pinpointing location within around twenty meters rather than within sectors of one-eighth to four square miles; it records location every two minutes or so for a daily average of 720 chartings rather than 101; and it can estimate elevation to reveal which floor of a building a phone is on. Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct \u201cretrospective[ly],\u201d and with no real effort, people\u2019s comings and goings in any area, enabling \u201ctireless and absolute surveillance\u201d of any number of people in any number of places. Carpenter, 585 U.S., at 312. And third, Location History implicates personal privacy interests even more than CSLI, because Location History is more the cell-phone user\u2019s own. Most cell-phone users
have no awareness of CSLI records, and would never try to retrieve them; by contrast, Google users regularly employ Location History as a personal journal. In that way, Location History resembles other private materials\u2014e.g., emails, documents, photographs, or calendars\u2014that even if stored on Google\u2019s servers, a user reasonably views as his own and expects to be shielded from the \u201cinquisitive eyes\u201d of the government. Id., at 305. Pp. 16\u201318.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(3) The Government\u2019s argument that accessing only a short amount of cell-phone location information does not count as a Fourth Amendment search fails. \u201c[E]ven short-term monitoring\u201d can provide \u201ca wealth of detail about [a person\u2019s] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations,\u201d United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 415, and this Court has never understood Fourth Amendment protections as kicking in only once an intrusion \u201cgoes too far,\u201d Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393, 415. Where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies regardless of \u201cthe quality or quantity of information\u201d the government obtains. Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 37. That approach makes all the more sense when, as with Location History, law enforcement officials can select the time-limited set of materials they want from an all-encompassing database. Pp. 18\u201323.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(4) The Government argues that the so-called third-party doctrine precludes Chatrie from invoking the Fourth Amendment\u2019s protections. The idea is that in \u201cauthoriz[ing] Google to collect, retain, and use\u201d his location information, Chatrie lost his legitimate expectation of privacy, and therefore his right to complain of a search. Brief for United States 15. But Carpenter refused to apply the third-party doctrine to CSLI, and no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History. In Carpenter, the Court rejected application of the third-party doctrine to CSLI because such information is \u201cqualitatively different\u201d from \u201ctelephone numbers and bank records,\u201d 585 U.S., at 309\u2014it is incomparably \u201crevealing\u201d and is \u201cnot truly \u2018shared\u2019 as one normally understands the term\u201d given that cell phones are \u201cindispensable to participation in modern society,\u201d id., at 315. Both differentiating features apply equally or better to Location History, which is even more \u201crevealing\u201d than CSLI and is \u201cnot truly shared\u201d in the normal sense of wanting a third party to see or use it. Id., at 315. The exposure of that information to Google is merely what happens when a user avails himself of one of the services on his cell phone. The Government\u2019s argument that generating Location History, unlike producing CSLI, is a voluntary choice is meritless. That argument ignores how and why Google users turn on Location History: Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not \u201cwork correctly\u201d otherwise, 2 App. 140\u2013141, while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users\u2019 location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government. More generally, an app-by-app, feature-by-feature method of granting Fourth Amendment protection misapprehends the nature of modern cell-phone use, where nearly everything requires some kind of \u201caffirmative act\u201d beyond \u201cpowering up\u201d a given app or service. The Government wishes to disconnect the activities people do on their cell phones from the mere act of carrying a turned-on cell phone (the thing that generates CSLI), with only the latter receiving assured Fourth Amendment protection. But the point of carrying smartphones is to use what is on them\u2014as Carpenter said, to use the apps and \u201cservices they provide.\u201d 585 U.S., at 315. Accordingly, a cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties\u2014which then can be freely passed on to the government\u2014just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do. Pp. 24\u201329.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(b) The conclusion that a Fourth Amendment search occurred does not resolve this case, because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only searches that are \u201cunreasonable.\u201d When law enforcement officials undertake a search to discover evidence of a crime, the reasonableness standard generally requires that they seek a warrant from \u201ca neutral and detached magistrate,\u201d Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 14, who may issue a warrant only when \u201cprobable cause is properly established and the scope of the authorized search is set out with particularity,\u201d Kentucky v. King, 563 U.S. 452, 459. The warrant issued here, as described earlier, was an uncommon, multi-step one, and the parties have contested the legality of each stage of the search process it authorized. The Fourth Circuit did not address the questions that unusual warrant raises. Because this is \u201ca court of review, not of first view,\u201d Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U.S. 709, 718, n. 7, 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\u2019s requirements of particularity and probable cause. Pp. 29\u201332.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A geofence warrant is a search because it captures location data. The mere collection of private data on the phone is not intended to be shared with third parties; essentially, a cell phone user has no control over that at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geofence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64328"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64335,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64328\/revisions\/64335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}