Geofence Warrants and the Fourth Amendment: Maybe the Court Is Catching Up
For seemingly decades now, our courts have tolerated a quiet workaround to the Fourth Amendment: tech companies vacuum up massive amounts of location data, and law enforcement simply buys or subpoenas it—often without naming a single suspect.
It is time for this to stop.
Geofence warrants flip the Constitution on its head by starting with everyone and working backward from there. There is no individualized suspicion in this regime.
Hopefully, this will soon change. This term, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Chatrie v. United States, the first case squarely addressing whether geofence warrants— which are really dragnet demands for location data from companies like Google—violate the Fourth Amendment. I
In Chatrie, police obtained location data for seemingly every single device near a bank robbery, then narrowed the list until they found a suspect—without individualized probable cause at the outset. The Court granted cert in January 2026 and will decide whether that kind of search passes constitutional muster. Here’s a good article about it: [scotusblog.com]
What’s promising to me is that this isn’t an issue with a typical ideological divide and that this fight isn’t new. It probably goes back to Kyllo v. United States (2001), where the Supreme Court held that police don’t get to use technology “not in general public use” to spy on you and learn details about the inside of your home, details that would otherwise be unknowable without a warrant. In Kyllo, the tech was infrared imaging. Today, it’s mass digital location tracking. The principle may be the same: advances in surveillance shouldn’t shrink constitutional rights.
I don’t know, may the Kyllo test needs to be replaced. But, assume the Court takes Kyllo seriously in the digital age… then we don’t have to accept a world where private companies collect intimate data and sell it to the police.
The Fourth Amendment was written to stop general warrants. Geofence warrants are general warrants. Chatrie may be the moment the United States Supreme Court finally says: enough.
Don’t even get me started on Flock cameras.