Reason: The Supreme Court’s Next Big Fourth Amendment Case

Reason: The Supreme Court’s Next Big Fourth Amendment Case by Damon Root (“At issue in the April 27 oral arguments in Chatrie v. United States is something known as a geofence warrant. It’s a law enforcement tool in which a tech company is required to hand over user information for all devices, such as cellphones, within a particular geographic area and specific period of time. In this case, a geofence warrant was served on Google by the police. That warrant told Google to search the location history of every one of its users in order to determine which users were present in the vicinity of a bank robbery. Okello Chatrie was ultimately convicted based on the information obtained via this geofence warrant. According to Chatrie and his lawyers, ‘the geofence warrant was an unconstitutional general warrant [that] compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.’ This ‘technology may be novel,’ they told the Court, ‘but the constitutional problem it presents is not. The Fourth Amendment was born of the Founders’ revulsion for general warrants and writs of assistance—instruments that allowed the government to search first and develop suspicions later.'”)