Supreme Court Reviews Police Use of Cell Location Data To Find Criminals (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0182990348
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/04/27/1721238/supreme-court-reviews-police-use-of-cell-location-data-to-find-criminals
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/us/politics/supreme-court-cell-data-geofence.html
> When the Call Federal Credit Union outside Richmond, Va., was robbed at gunpoint in 2019, the suspect took $195,000 from the bank's vault and fled before the police arrived. A detective interviewed witnesses and reviewed the bank's security footage. But with no leads, the officer relied on a so-called geofence warrant to sweep up location data from all the cellphones in the vicinity of the bank for the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. The data he gathered eventually led to the identification and conviction of Okello T. Chatrie, now 31, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States in 2017.
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> Geofence searches have become increasingly popular as a tool for law enforcement, but critics say they put at risk the personal data of everyday Americans and violate the Constitution. Mr. Chatrie challenged the use of a geofence warrant in his conviction, [1]in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday . The justices will examine how the Constitution's traditional protections apply to rapidly changing technology that has made it easier for the police to scoop up vast amounts of data to assemble a detailed look at a person's movements and activities.
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> It has been eight years since the court last took up a major Fourth Amendment case involving the expectations of privacy for the millions of people carrying cellphones in the digital age. In that 2018 case, the court ruled that the government generally needs a warrant to collect location data drawn from cell towers about the customers of cellphone companies. The court has also limited the government's ability to use GPS devices to track suspects' movements, and it has required that law enforcement get a warrant to search individual cellphones. In Mr. Chatrie's case, the government did obtain a warrant, but one that his legal team said was overly broad, violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/us/politics/supreme-court-cell-data-geofence.html
if they found evidence (Score:2)
Such as fat stacks of cash that were still banded with a bank teller's signiture on them in his abode plus cellular location data proving he was there at the time of the robbery that is pretty damning evidence and it should be an open & shut case finding the suspect guilty
Re:if they found evidence (Score:5, Informative)
But if it wasn't legal to obtain the cell phone data in the first place, then none of that is admissible as it's [1]fruit of the poisonous tree [wikipedia.org].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
Re: (Score:2)
Unless that can be bypassed with [1]parallel construction. [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Seems overly broad (Score:2)
IANAL, but to me it seems overly broad to get a warrant that says "we want to know every phone that was in this area during a 30-minute period." Just like if they wanted a warrant to search every person who, say, was in a museum the day a theft occurred, before letting them leave the premises. To me that seems to broad.
On the other hand, if they had some other evidence, such as a tip, that Mr. X suddenly had a bunch of cash and was bragging about knocking off a bank, then getting a warrant to see of Mr. X
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
IANAL either, but I think that the type of "search" is pretty important here.
To expand on your analogy. Let's say that the police want to physically search and question every single person who attended a museum the week of a theft. They haul each person in for a full 36 hours of interrogation, tied to a chair, complete with waterboarding, and a nurse in goggles and leather apron, pulling on a thick latex glove with a *snap" as they let it go. That's pretty obviously unreasonably broad search and seizure.
Re: (Score:2)
> The data gets collected by at least a dozen data aggregators, who go on to sell it to hundreds of other companies. Which means that my cell phone records are probably for sale to literally anyone on the planet who goes to the effort of calling up a data aggregator and writing a check.
True, and I'm opposed to this too, but it is irrelevant when it comes to the constitutionality of a search for a criminal case. For example, Lowe's may have records that I bought a shovel last year, and they may have even sold that info to a company that markets for fence installers. But that doesn't give the government the right to browse through those data to try to find suspects for a round of recent grave robberies, even if they purchase it from Lowe's.
And if they are allowed to search your cell phone
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that there must be limits to what the gubbermint can do to me, and how it monitors me. I'm not saying that they get free game on everything.
But, let's take your shovel analogy. When I buy the shovel, my cell phone transmits that data to at least a dozen places, which then sell that info to a hundred other places, which inundate me with ads for other garden tools for the next 5 years. I see this play out on my cell phone constantly.
So, it's not just one or two companies that know about my sho
When Supreme Court... (Score:2)
...will discuss the case of [1]dupe posting [slashdot.org] on Slashdot ?
[1] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/04/27/0113209/bank-robber-challenges-conviction-based-on-his-cellphones-location-data
Already solved (Score:2)
Government agencies are already buying publicly-available databases of this kind of thing, not collecting it themselves (https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/04/26/0541202/privacy-advocate-accuses-us-government-of-investing-in-ai-powered-mass-surveillance). Get in on the ground floor: Start a company to track cell phone data, sell it to the government as they want it, everyone's happy .... Oh, wait, that's exactly what happened here except that the government agency didn't pay for it this time.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the Third Party Doctrine is unevenly applied. And this ruling is important because it's a question straight into expectation of privacy of data held by third parties and it may affect those other things too. With how the court has changed and the recent unpopularity of stare decisis, the landscape may drastically change. The last decision with Carpenter when the question was on cell tower data. The coalition for enforcing restrictions was John G. Roberts Jr and the liberal justices, since then Amy Cone
Just an FYI (Score:2)
In America, if you have a cell phone that's on, cops already have real-time access to your location should they have your phone number and search for it.
Aggregate Telemetry first, then isolate identity (Score:2)
I work in the EV world and "telemetry", machine-based data is being collected all the time from people who opt-in for broadcasting vehicle health back to headquarters. All of the identity information is obfuscated as aggregate information is processed. In cases where outliers show up such as seeing signals pointing to isolation fault or other types of imminent, catchable failures, it is possible to grab that outlier and then work backwards to identify the customer and then do proactive outreach for servic
But we still can't use cellphone data to find... (Score:3)
[1]front page dupes. [slashdot.org]
[1] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/04/27/0113209/bank-robber-challenges-conviction-based-on-his-cellphones-location-data
Re:But we still can't use cellphone data to find.. (Score:4, Informative)
The difference with this article is that it comes after the arguments, has a fair amount of information on the questions that different justices asked, and the general feeling for the outcome.
> In Mr. Chatrie’s case, the government did obtain a warrant, but one that his legal team said was overly broad, violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. The Justice Department has insisted that a warrant was not needed to sift through anonymous location data. By the end of the Monday’s argument, it seemed likely that a majority of the court would reject that position and find that warrants are generally required for searches of location data. Several justices also suggested they might seek to provide some guidance for ensuring that such warrants are as narrow and specific as possible. It was not immediately clear what that outcome would mean for Mr. Chatrie’s case.