Chatrie v. United States & Geofence Warrants

The legal battle of Chatrie v. United States is a landmark case that serves as a modern-day collision course between police investigative power and the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. The Supreme Court is set to hear argument on this case on April 27, 2026 which is the day this video was created.

At the heart of the case is the geofence warrant—a digital dragnet that reverses traditional investigative logic. Instead of starting with a suspect and finding their location, police start with a location and find every suspect, and innocent bystander, within it.

The United States Supreme Court is hearing the case which started when a split Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that the government did not conduct a search under the Fourth Amendment when it obtained the defendant's location history data from his service provider in connection with a “geofence” warrant.

The warrant asked for not just his location history but the location history data for all users of mobile devices who were within a 150-meter radius of a credit union 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after it was robbed.

Fourth Circuit Ruling

The Fourth Circuit concluded that the defendant did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location history data from his phone. They didn’t find that no one ever has an expectation of privacy in their location. They said he gave up any privacy rights because he voluntarily exposed his location to his provider. Under the third-party doctrine a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties.  Also remember that privacy was a key issue in the abortion debate.  Roe v Wade focused on an implied right to privacy that the majority found existed in the constitution even though the constitution contained no specific right to privacy language.  The overbroad language in the Fourth Amendment may be an implied right to privacy but was Roe v Wade was overturned it is not clear how the Supreme Court will find a right to privacy in the Fourth Amendment when it does not per its recent rulings, exist generally in the constitution.

A criticism of the geowarrant is that it often sweeps up data from innocent bystanders, creating, as noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a risk of turning innocent people into suspects.  It is a core principle of the Fourth Amendment that the warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched and the items to be seized to prevent overbroad, general searches.  Of course when the Fourth Amendment was enacted there was no concept of just how easily the government could access personal location data.  In fact much of the data that we routinely allow the government to obtain in search warrants would be unthinkable to a person who lived at the birth of our nation.  In other words, when we talk about an overbroad warrant we are in the context of a society where privacy is almost non-existent compared to how we lived in the late 17 hundreds when our concepts of freedom and the Bill of Rights were discussed and enacted.

Electronic Freedom Foundation View

The Electronic Freedom Foundation may be criticized by some as being a left wing group but put that aside and consider only their factual arguments. In a published article they state and I quote, .... geofence warrants—which compel companies to provide information on every electronic device in a given area during a given time period—are the digital version of the exploratory rummaging that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment specifically intended to prevent.

Read the EFF's Amicus Brief on Chatri

Unlike typical warrants, geofence warrants do not name a suspect or even target a specific individual or device. Instead, police cast a digital dragnet, demanding location data on every device in a geographic area during a certain time period, regardless of whether the device owner has any connection to the crime under investigation. These searches simultaneously impact the privacy of millions and turn innocent bystanders into suspects, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. .... Close quote.

Example of When a Geowarrant Might be Useful (Will Cole Allen's Case Justify a Geowarrant?)

There is another side to this though. take the recent case of Cole Tomas Allen and his attack at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. Did he act alone? Where did he keep his weapons? A geowarrant could help answer that question as they can track his movements and that of other people associated with him - in the critical hours between when he left home and got on a train to Washington DC. Is the intrusion on people’s privacy worth the chance that an assistant or other person worked with Allen that day? On the other hand, do you need a geowarrant for that? Probably not, you can track Allen’s specific phone and limit the geowarrant to other phones that got within 100 feet of his. That is a type of geowarrant but not a non-specific very broad warrant. If you went more broadly and tracked all activity in the proximity to his house, that is a slightly different type of geowarrant that is perhaps more suspect. You may find that the Supreme Court makes this type of distinction finding that geowarrants with specific parameters are permissible while those that are useful but not limited are impermissible.

Tech Companies Self Regulate

Of course, Tech companies currently self-regulate the collection and organization of geofence data. Google announced that it would phase out the internal database containing user geolocation data.  What Google did was move the location history from Google's computers/servers to the person's phone or device.  With this done Google no longer has access to the data.

Tesla keeps data which shows your cars speed and behavior just before a crash. You can also opt out of geo tracking although this can be difficult to actually do. This is something that you can access in case you have a car accident. Where then does voluntary submission to data collection mean that the government can also gain access?

is there a Middle Ground?

The United States argues that geofence warrants are a vital evolution in law enforcement. In this specific case that is before the Supreme Court police were investigating a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia. With no physical leads, they turned to Google’s Location History data.  This is a strong argument favoring the usefulness of a geowarrant.

The government relied on the Third-Party Doctrine. They contended that users voluntarily share their location data with Google to use services like Maps. Under established law, once you give information to a third party, you lose a reasonable expectation of privacy. They maintained that in an era where criminals use technology to evade capture, police must be able to use that same technology to identify leads. They caught the perpetrator.  So in this case geowarrants were not broadly argued for .... the government argued voluntary waiver.

The Defense’s perspective was predictable. Okello Chatrie’s defense team argued that geofence warrants are general warrants—the exact type of overreach the Founding Fathers sought to prevent.

The Fourth Amendment requires warrants to particularly describe the person or place to be searched. The defense argued that searching everyone in a 17-acre area, including a church near the bank, is the definition of overbroad. They pointed out that this warrant captured data from 19 individuals who had nothing to do with the crime. They argued that police have no right to seize the private data of dozens of innocent people just to see if one might be a criminal.

Finally, there is a Judicial middle ground. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson offered a nuanced conclusion. He was remarkably critical of the warrant, calling it deeply troubling and noting that it lacked sufficient probable cause because it swept up too many innocent people.

However, the judge did not throw out the evidence. He ruled that the police acted in good faith, believing the warrant was legal at the time because the law around geofencing was a legal frontier. However this almost a case specific decision because it provides little guidance for the future.

While the Chatrie case is rather plain vanilla in terms of the type of crime, what if there was an arson that led to the loss of a firefighter’s life. A geofence warrant for all activity in the area of the fire might give you a list of 200 suspects when previously you had no list of suspects whatsoever. Is a geowarrant valid, useful and constitutional under those circumstances?   You are seeing that the Chatrie case pits a valuable investigative tool against broad privacy intrusions - where is the line going to be drawn?

In the Fifth Circuit (covering Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), geofence warrants were ruled categorically unconstitutional in 2024, as they are considered "general warrants" that lack specificity. In the Fourth Circuit which influenced legal standards in other regions like Virginia, courts previously upheld their use, though that is now under Supreme Court review

A recent article in the Regulatory review highlights some of the dangers of geofence warrants, and again I quote General geofence warrants not specifically tailored to uncover evidence of a particular crime in a particular place violate the Fourth Amendment, argues Mary Fan of the University of Washington School of Law in an article. Fan explains that, to be constitutional, a geofence warrant must have “digital probable cause,” meaning that such warrants can only be granted when it is likely that a database controlled by a corporation has evidence of an existing crime. Close quote ...... in other words some geo warrants can be lawful if they have specific purposes and limitations so that they function just like any other search warrant.

Other Uses - Broader Uses with AI

The danger of geo warrants is that they can be so broad that they uncover crimes, political conduct and other matters that would not otherwise be known to law enforcement. While uncovering crimes is good on the surface, the ability of the government to snoop on everyone at anytime in the guise of uncovering crime is a huge blow to personal privacy.  Keep in mind that the Chatrie issue is broader than what is written here as I outline the issues before the Supreme Court.  AI can process geo data and integrate it with the vast amounts of other data that it has access to.  ESRI talks about "Geospatial AI" saying that "As problems become more complex, geographic information system (GIS) software enriched with AI is the key technology to meet the moment."  Its webpage gives an example:

Microsoft partnered with Esri and Impact Observatory to build an AI-powered land-cover map. Geospatial AI enables automated land-use monitoring at 10-meter resolution, significantly increasing the scale and frequency of global observations compared to previous methods. The capability will help answer pressing questions about the human footprint, weather pattern changes, and environmental issues.

While this is a wonderful use of the data it also shows how artificial intelligence can use geodata to create vastly more detailed views of an individual's movement, conduct and perhaps thoughts and beliefs.

Law Office of Daniel Horowitz

The Law office of Daniel Horowitz focuses on cutting edge legal issues such as the geofence limitations, mental state defenses for crimes and technical defenses for complex fraud cases such as the historic case of United States versus former Ukraine prime minister Pavel Lazarenko. If you are facing federal or state criminal charges, contact Daniel Horowitz at (925) 283-1863