A geofence warrant requires Google to produce location history data for all users within a specific geographic area during a particular time period, affecting only users who have opted into Google collecting and storing their location data.
The appellate ruling stated that obtaining the location data for only two hours’ worth of time such as in this particular case did not violate the suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable searches and seizures, adding he had “voluntarily exposed” this information to Google by opting into location sharing.
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Julius N. Richardson wrote in the majority opinion that the government’s request for the brief time period of data did not amount to a Fourth Amendment search at all, thus he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to his personal data under the third-party doctrine.
The third-party doctrine is a Supreme Court precedent that holds that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily shared with third parties.
“The Fourth Amendment is an important safeguard to individual liberty,” Judge Richardson wrote. “But its protections are not endless. To transgress its command, the government must first conduct a search.”
The defendant, Okello Chatrie, argued that the geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment due to a lack of probable cause and particularity. However, the court held that obtaining two hours’ worth of his location data did not amount to a Fourth Amendment search, as he had voluntarily exposed this information to Google.
In 2022, a district court denied Mr. Chatrie’s motion to suppress the location data as evidence, citing the government’s “good faith” in obtaining the data. While the lower court expressed concerns about the threat geofence warrants pose to user privacy, it ultimately sided with the government.
Mr. Chatrie then entered a conditional guilty plea and was sentenced to 141 months in prison and three years supervised release for robbing $195,000 from the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, prior to his appeal to the Fourth Circuit.
Dissenting Opinion
In a lengthy dissenting opinion which accounts for nearly 70 pages of the 103-page ruling, Appellate Judge James Andrew Wynn said that the majority failed to uphold the Constitution in its ruling.The high court ruled in Carpenter that the government must obtain a warrant to access historical cell-site location information (CSLI). A CSLI warrant targets individual movements connected to a single device, while a geofence warrant gathers data from anyone within a defined area.
In Carpenter, the court’s decision stemmed from the FBI’s use of CSLI to track Timothy Carpenter’s movements without a warrant, which led to his conviction for robberies.
The high court decided that CSLI is highly detailed and revealing, thus individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in this data, requiring a warrant supported by probable cause under the Fourth Amendment.
The majority in Mr. Chatrie’s case held that Carpenter applies only to the collection of at least seven days of historical CSLI and not to other forms of digital data such as Google location history.
In contrast, Judge Wynn’s dissent argues for a broader application, viewing Carpenter as setting a precedent for various types of digital data that can reveal intimate details about a person’s life.
The majority contended that Carpenter did not fully overturn the third-party doctrine—while the dissent emphasized the involuntary nature of data sharing with services like Google, arguing that users do not meaningfully consent to extensive tracking, thus necessitating greater privacy protections.
According to the majority, users who opt into Google location history have no reasonable expectation of privacy because they voluntarily expose their data and have the ability to review, edit, or delete their data, reinforcing the third-party doctrine.
The dissent, on the other hand, criticized this view by pointing out the complexities users face in managing and deleting their data, arguing that the difficulty undermines the notion of voluntary exposure and meaningful control.
Judge Wynn said the high court had guided judges to “safeguard against novel technologies that may enable government infringement on constitutional rights,” but that the majority had not done so in their decision.
“For the first time since the ratification of the Fourth Amendment, the government is permitted to retroactively surveil American citizens anywhere they go—no warrant needed—so long as it keeps its snooping to a few hours or perhaps a few days,” Judge Wynn wrote.
“New technologies that collect ever-more-intimate data are becoming integral to daily life in ways we could not have imagined even a short time ago. This fact of modern life—that we cannot know what developments, and what risks posed by those developments, lie just around the corner—should counsel courts to exercise humility.”
The majority responded to this particular section of the dissent, stating “it is the dissent that fails to heed its own warning,” Judge Richardson wrote. “Instead of faithfully apply [sic] established principles to the case before us, the dissent would have us depart from binding case law and apply a novel, unwieldy multifactor balancing test to reach the dissent’s preferred policy outcome. We decline the invitation. Our Fourth Amendment doctrine compels a clear result here. If one thinks that this result is undesirable on policy grounds, those concerns should be taken to Congress.”
