{"id":60197,"date":"2025-02-19T10:45:25","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T15:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=60197"},"modified":"2025-02-19T10:45:25","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T15:45:25","slug":"harv-l-rev-blog-essay-much-ado-about-geofence-warrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=60197","title":{"rendered":"Harv. L. Rev. Blog Essay: Much Ado About Geofence Warrants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Harv. L. Rev. Blog Essay: <a href=\"https:\/\/harvardlawreview.org\/blog\/2025\/02\/much-ado-about-geofence-warrants\/\">Much Ado About Geofence Warrants: United States v. Chatrie, 107 F.4th 319 (4th Cir. 2024) &amp; United States v. Jamarr Smith, 110 F.4th 817 (5th Cir. 2024)<\/a> by Jackie O&#8217;Neil:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>In 2020, law enforcement agencies served Google with more than 11,500 warrants directing the company to conduct sweeping searches of its vast location database. These \u201cgeofence warrants\u201d instructed Google to search detailed location information logged by hundreds of millions of devices and to return lists of users found to be within a particular area during a specified time period. Geofence warrants have been used to identify the perpetrators of serious crimes. They have also turned innocent passersby \u2014 a man tracking his bike rides in the vicinity of a burglarized home, for example \u2014 into suspects. Recently, the Fourth and Fifth Circuits issued diametrically opposed rulings on the constitutionality of geofence warrants. This development dispelled any lingering delusions that current Fourth Amendment doctrine is a useful and coherent fit for private mass-surveillance technology. In particular, geofence warrants and other mass-surveillance tools have obliterated the utility of probable cause as a meaningful standard for balancing privacy interests against law enforcement needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harv. L. Rev. Blog Essay: Much Ado About Geofence Warrants: United States v. Chatrie, 107 F.4th 319 (4th Cir. 2024) &amp; United States v. Jamarr Smith, 110 F.4th 817 (5th Cir. 2024) by Jackie O&#8217;Neil:<\/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-60197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geofence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60198,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60197\/revisions\/60198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}