But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals. <\/p>\n
Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a \u201cgroundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a \u201cgeofence warrant,\u201d<\/a> referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time. <\/p>\n The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.<\/p>\n Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal<\/a> on April 27.<\/p>\n The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment. <\/p>\n The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned. <\/p>\n This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.<\/p>\n Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment. <\/p>\n Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled \u201cgeofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.\u201d <\/p>\n Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court\u2019s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.<\/p>\n (Alex Wong \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on \u201cunreasonable searches and seizures\u201d arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing. <\/p>\n The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants. <\/p>\n Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie\u2019s \u201cprivate location information … with 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie\u2019s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was no search here,\u201d Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data. <\/p>\n He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant. <\/p>\n Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, \u201csurely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one\u2019s public movements\u201d is not private either.<\/p>\n Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data. <\/p>\n Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to \u201cfrustrate law enforcement\u2019s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals\u201d or cause \u201cmore cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant<\/a> to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount. <\/p>\n The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank. <\/p>\n After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff\u2019s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen. <\/p>\n The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder. <\/p>\n That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected<\/a> their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the \u201cnovelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.\u201d <\/p>\n The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance. <\/p>\n By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan. <\/p>\n The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed. <\/p>\n Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment. <\/p>\n![\"Chief](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776602653_703_.jpeg\")
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