Star Metro - US Supreme Court rules on dragnet searches of cellphone location data

The court, in a 6-3 ruling, said that such searches -- which scan for every phone in a certain place at a specific time -- implicate the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against "unreasonable searches and seizures."

However it said that a lower court would have to determine if the use of the search in the case at hand was in fact reasonable.

The case was brought by Okello Chatrie, identified as a suspect in a 2019 Virginia bank robbery after investigators obtained a warrant to search cellphone location data stored by Google.

Chatrie, who was armed with a gun and made off with $195,000, was eventually convicted and is serving a 12-year prison sentence.

His lawyer, Adam Unikowsky, argued that geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment by authorizing a search of every single person's account to find who was within a geofence perimeter.

Justice Elena Kagan, who was joined by the two other liberals on the court and three conservatives, wrote the majority opinion.

"An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cellphone's location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information -- even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company," Kagan wrote.

Eden Heilman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, welcomed the ruling.

"The Court's decision confirms that law enforcement does not have a blank check to use new technology to conduct warrantless surveillance of people's movements," Heilman said. "We do not lose our right to privacy simply because we use a cellphone."

Defending the use of geofence warrants, the government argued that a smartphone user can always choose to turn off location services.

Geofence warrants were notably used to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a bid to block congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden's presidential election victory.

Google no longer stores location history data on its servers and has deleted all such data. Other technology companies continue to collect location data, however.

P.Graham--SMC