Constitutional Law
Aug. 13, 2026
Geofence warrants after Chatrie: new limits, same old constitutional duty
The Supreme Court's decision in Chatrie v. United States holds that geofence warrants seeking Google location data constitute Fourth Amendment searches, requiring California law enforcement to satisfy probable cause and particularity when using the increasingly common investigative tool.
When traditional leads dried up in the investigation of a 2019 armed robbery at
a federal credit union outside Richmond, detectives turned to a tool law
enforcement agencies have increasingly relied on in recent years: Google.
They got a geofence warrant for Location History data covering every phone near the bank for about an hour. One of those phones belonged to Okello Chatrie. That data helped ID him, and the rest is history: arrest, con...
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