Supreme Court agrees to decide if police can seek sweeping cellphone location data in investigations
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to review whether police warrants that allow access to large amounts of cellphone location data to identify people near a crime scene are constitutional.
The practice of issuing geofence warrants has divided lower courts, some of which have ruled that it constitutes the kind of sweeping warrants that are prohibited under the 4th Amendment.
The high court has been considering at least two appeals on the issue in recent weeks. One came from a man convicted of robbing a bank in Virginia in 2019 who was identified after police collected cellphone location data from Google.
Police were able to identify cellphones that pinged location data to apps near crimes. They were then able to identify the phone’s owner. But in the process, the appeals allege, the police obtained anonymized location data from millions of other people who were not involved in crimes.
Eight years ago, a divided Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement generally needed to establish probable cause before accessing cellphone tower data to identify suspects. In that case, Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority with the then four-justice liberal wing. Three current justices – conservatives Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – were in dissent.
In the Virginia case, police say Okello Chatrie passed a note urging a bank teller to “hand over all the cash” and that he needed “at least 100k and nobody will get hurt and your family will be set free.” Initially, police were unable to identify a suspect, but officers noticed on security cameras that the suspect was using his phone prior to the robbery.
Law enforcement served a geofence warrant on Google seeking location data for every device near the bank within an hour of the robbery.
Chatrie was later convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
“When magistrate judges receive requests for geofence warrants, they need to know what rules apply,” his attorneys told the Supreme Court. “The same is true for tech companies that wish to cooperate with law enforcement while also protecting their users’ privacy and complying with the Constitution.”
The federal government has argued that the warrants do not constitute a search for 4th Amendment purposes and it notes that users must opt in to location services on their phones, which they might do in order to access real-time traffic information, for instance.
Google, which received most of the warrants, changed its policy last year to shift how the data is stored so that it is far harder to comply with the warrants. Because of that, the federal government told the Supreme Court, the case is effectively moot.
“Google’s policy change,” the government said, “significantly diminishes the frequency with which geofence-warrant issues will arise in future prosecutions.”
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