Supreme Court considers lawfulness of broad police requests for cell phone location data

WASHINGTON — On May 20, 2019, at 4:50 p.m., an armed man holding a cell phone entered the Midlothian, Virginia, branch of Call Federal Credit Union and handed a teller a note demanding money.

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At one point, brandishing the gun, the man ordered the manager to open the safe. He walked away with $195,000.

Police were initially perplexed when they tried to determine the identity of the thief, setting off a chain of events that led to a Supreme Court hearing Monday, the latest in a series of cases on how new technologies interact with the Constitution’s protection of individual rights.

The detective in charge was able to identify Okello Chatrie as the prime suspect by obtaining data from Google on cell phone users near the bank at the time of the crime.

A federal judge has approved what’s known as a “location warrant” that allows police to search for such information even if they don’t have a specific suspect in mind.

Google initially identified 19 users, but the agent ultimately narrowed their search to Chatrie, whose phone had Google’s “Location History” setting enabled. This feature is used for applications such as Google Maps. The data showed he was at or near the location ten minutes before the theft and then left shortly after.

After further investigation, Chatrie ultimately pleaded guilty to federal charges of armed robbery and brandishing a firearm, and he was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. But he reserved the right to appeal the issue currently before the Supreme Court: Did the broad request to Google violate its right to be free from illegal searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution?

The Supreme Court has, in several previous cases, had to address similar questions about how the Fourth Amendment applies to new technologies, ranging from wiretapping and thermal imaging to GPS tracking devices. In a similar case, the court ruled in 2017 that warrants were necessary to obtain location information derived from data collected from cell towers.

The Chatrie case involves a broader, unrestricted search, what privacy advocates call a dragnet that scoops up information sometimes from hundreds of innocent people. A geofence warrant was infamous for identifying supporters of President Donald Trump who broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“This is what authoritarian nightmares are made of,” Jake Karr, an attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, said in an interview.

The Trump administration, represented by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, defends the practice, arguing that no search took place, meaning a warrant is not necessary. This is despite the fact that the agents had one in Chatrie’s case.

If the court were to conclude that geofence searches do not require a warrant, it would open the door to government abuses that could infringe on the right to free speech by targeting, for example, protesters, Karr added.

The Justice Department argues, among other things, that people have no expectation of privacy when it comes to such information, in part because Chatrie voluntarily shared it with Google.

Even assuming a warrant was required, the one issued in Chatrie’s case was legal because law enforcement had “probable reason to believe that Google had information that could help identify the thief using a cell phone,” Sauer wrote in court papers.

Although the case could have broad legal ramifications, Google has since changed its storage policies. Now, location history is stored on an individual’s device, and no longer by Google itself on its servers. That means the company “can no longer respond to geolocation warrants based on location history data,” its lawyers said in a brief filed in the case.