By Harrison Scott, ZMO Law Summer Intern 2026
Imagine you want to commit the perfect crime—think Ocean’s Eleven-style: rob a bank so cleanly that the police never even know you were involved. Don’t worry about wiping away fingerprints, destroying physical evidence, or blackmailing your accomplices. That smartphone sitting in your pocket is the ultimate government witness, providing unimpeachable evidence of where you were and who you were with, even if you weren’t using it.
That’s what happened to Okello Chatrie.
The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Okello’s case, Chatrie v. United States, with a decision expected to come down in the coming weeks. At the heart of the matter is a modern police tool that should make anyone who carries a cell phone shudder. The Court’s decision will have broad implications about whether the Constitution can protect the privacy of our personal information and data.
In 2019, somebody robbed a credit union just outside Richmond, Virginia of $195,000. Investigators had surveillance footage showing the robber carrying a smartphone, but otherwise, the case went cold fast. With no suspects, investigators turned to Google, obtaining a warrant directing the tech giant to provide location-history data for every single device present within roughly 150 meters (almost 500 feet) of the credit union during a one-hour window on either side of the robbery.
This wasn’t a normal warrant. Traditionally, if police want a judge to sign off on a search, they must identify a particular suspect and show probable cause to search that specific person’s records. The warrant in Chatrie’s case—a so-called “geofence warrant”—reverses the normal process. Instead of identifying a suspect first, police sweep up data relating to everyone in a geographic area, and then work from there to find a potential perpetrator. Between 2018 and 2020, Google answered more than 20,000 of these warrants.
Google’s compliance mechanism follows a three step process:
First, police get anonymized location data for all devices that were present in the specified radius during the specified time (in Chatrie, that radius included a church, a medical center, and private homes).
Second, police look at the anonymized paths taken by the phones and return to Google, asking for expanded tracking data to see where a smaller subset of users went outside the radius of the crime scene.
Finally, police use all of the information they have been given in the prior two steps to whittle down to the strongest suspects, and they ask Google for the actual names and accounts for those individuals.
In Chatrie, 19 people, including Okello Chatrie, were initially found inside the area around the bank after Google searched through roughly 592 million accounts. So to catch one bank robber, the government monitored 18 entirely innocent people going about their daily lives. Many geofence warrants are much larger – the FBI reportedly swept up 5,000 phones in a geofence warrant in connection with the January 6 investigation at the U.S. Capitol. Some of those were in airplane mode.
Once caught, Chatrie ended up entering a conditional guilty plea, but went on to challenge the constitutionality of the warrant that the investigators in his case had used.
Whether the government can use this kind of “digital dragnet” without a traditional warrant depends on a legal framework that is struggling to keep pace with modern technology. The Fourth Amendment protects individual liberty and privacy based on people’s expectations. To understand the stakes in Chatrie’s challenge, we look back at how the Supreme Court has historically defined Americans’ “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Generally, the Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and seizures, establishing that people have a right to privacy in “their persons, homes, papers, and effects.” If the government violates an individual’s Fourth Amendment rights, evidence obtained as a result of the illegal search or seizure can be suppressed – it is generally not admissible against the person in a criminal trial.
Courts legal frameworks are designed for a physical world. For example, if you voluntarily give information to a bank or phone company, you effectively lose your right to keep it private. This “third-party doctrine” loophole allowed police to access mountains of paperwork with a warrant or subpoena against the bank or phone company, not the customer. But in 2018, the Supreme Court signaled a change in Carpenter v. United States, acknowledging that digital location data is different from documents in a filing cabinet. In that landmark ruling, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that “sometimes information remains private even when held by a third party.”
Against this backdrop, Chatrie’s case forces the Supreme Court to confront a critical question raised by ubiquitous use of cell phones that track their users: Does the Fourth Amendment’s protection extend to the thousands of data points your phone silently transmits every single day?
At oral argument, Justice Sotomayor swiftly attacked the government’s premise that citizens “choose” to share their personal data. She pushed back on the idea that clicking “accept” on an app’s terms of service constitutes consent and questioned how voluntary such consent can be if tracking software requires many steps to disable.
By contrast, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito seemed skeptical about claims to privacy based on the phone in your pocket. They characterized location tracking as a user-controlled feature, with Roberts saying: “if you don’t want them [the government] to peer into your window, you can close your window or the shades.”
Justices Barrett and Gorsuch seemed to land in the middle, fretting over the sweeping scope of the geofence searches. Their questions hinted at the broader implications of the Court’s ruling here–the idea that a ruling giving geofence warrants a constitutional green light, could dismantle constitutional personal privacy protections. Barrett echoed the same concerns that may be crossing your mind right now. She told the lawyers in open court: “I need to check my location services settings, plainly.”
The justices took a close look at how Google handled the data, and questioned whether the searches could be executed with stricter guardrails, rather than banning them outright. Given the fractured nature of oral argument, a sweeping, all-or-nothing decision in favor of Chatrie or the government seems unlikely.
Instead, the Supreme Court seems poised to issue a narrow ruling that directly targets the lack of judicial oversight in how geofence searches are handled. Questions from both sides of the bench at oral argument signaled that the justices are leaning toward a decision that imposes some limits. But none of the justices seemed eager to ban these warrants entirely, even though Judge Barrett suffered the indignity of having to take her phone out in the middle of the argument.
The real stakes: it’s about your data, not just Google
Google is aware that keeping track of every user’s location and storing the data in its central servers is a terrible idea. The government emphasized that Google has moved user location history off centralized servers and directly onto individual smartphones to try to minimize the privacy impact.
But this case is about far more than just one tech giant.
Even if Google stops archiving your movements, hundreds of other entities–from mobile games and weather apps to auto manufacturers and fitness trackers–continue to quietly collect and store your personal metrics and data. Even worse: these companies aren’t just storing this data–they’re selling it.
In March, 404 Media reported that our friends at ICE and Customs and Border Patrol had sourced location data from the digital advertising market to track people’s locations and phone movements. Anyone have privacy concerns with that?
And all this only gets worse with AI: the CEO of Anthropic spoke out back in February to warn the public of the potential for these vast data troves to be combined by AI to produce “a comprehensive picture of any person’s life–automatically and at massive scale.”
Facing government surveillance? Contact ZMO Law PLLC
The boundaries of digital civil liberties and constitutional privacy rights are shifting rapidly. If you or a loved one are facing criminal charges involving mobile device tracking, digital surveillance, or cell-site location data, having proactive and sophisticated legal representation is vital. Contact ZMO Law PLLC at (212) 685-0999 to consult with our experienced legal defense team today. After you call, turn off location tracking on all the apps on your phone.