Most Geofence Warrants Are Unconstitutional: Appeals Court

Most geofence warrants are for information from Google.
Most Geofence Warrants Are Unconstitutional: Appeals Court
A man holds a phone, in this file photo. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times
Zachary Stieber
Updated:
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Warrants that often result in Google searching its voluminous user database are unconstitutional, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Aug. 12.

The geofence warrants violate the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said.

“We hold that geofence warrants are modern-day general warrants and are unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment,” U.S. Circuit Judge Judge Carolyn Dineen King wrote in the 39-page decision.

The amendment protects people against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Three people who robbed a U.S. Postal Service driver in 2018 sued because investigators turned to geofence warrants when they couldn’t identify any suspects. The people said they have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it concerns their digital data.

The warrants are based on crime scene locations and garner a list of phones and phone owners who were at or near the scene when the crime was committed.

Most geofence warrants are made to Google, and Google was presented with a warrant in the Postal Service case. Google, when presented with geofence warrants, has to search its entire database to find responsive records, which come from users who have agreed to share their location history.

When it searches its database, Google does conduct a search that implicates the Fourth Amendment, the appeals court panel said.

“Of particular concern is the fact that a geofence will retroactively track anyone with location history enabled, regardless of whether a particular individual is suspicious or moving within an area that is typically granted Fourth Amendment protection,” King said.

The decision runs counter to a recent ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which found in United States v. Okello T. Chatrie that geofencing warrants didn’t implicate Fourth Amendment rights because Chatrie voluntarily shared the information ultimately gained by law enforcement with Google. That ruling was based in part on how many cell phone users opt in to having their location history monitored.

The Fifth Circuit panel, though, said a number of those users aren’t informed and that opting in may not even be voluntary.

“Users are bombarded multiple times with requests to opt in across multiple apps,” King said. “These requests typically innocuously promise app optimization, rather than reveal the fact that users’ locations will be comprehensively stored in a ‘Sensorvault,’ providing Google the means to access this data and share it with the government. Even Google’s own employees have indicated that deactivating Location History data based on Google’s ‘limited and partially hidden’ warnings is ‘difficult enough that people won’t figure it out.’”

King was joined by U.S. Circuit Judges James C. Ho and Kurt D. Engelhardt.

While the panel sided with the individuals, the decision also upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a motion to suppress the evidence that law enforcement officers obtained through the results from the geofence warrants.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that there is a good-faith exception to the Fourth Amendment. Circumstances when the exception doesn’t apply include when a magistrate judge who approved the warrant abandons his judicial role and when the warrant “is so facially deficient in failing to particularize the place to be searched or the things to be seized that executing officers cannot reasonably presume it to be valid.”

The robbers argued that the officers who sought the warrants offered conclusions that weren’t based on any probable cause, rendering the warrant facially deficient. But the panel disagreed.

“The inspectors were utilizing a cutting-edge investigative technique with which neither Inspector had personal experience. To that end, the inspectors diligently attempted to make sure that their warrant comported with the Fourth Amendment by communicating with other law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the inspectors exhibited no malicious intent through the actions that they took,” King said. “Thus, we cannot fault law enforcement’s actions considering the novelty of the technique and the dearth of court precedent to follow.”

Zachary Stieber
Zachary Stieber
Senior Reporter
Zachary Stieber is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times based in Maryland. He covers U.S. and world news. Contact Zachary at [email protected]
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