Washington, D.C., June 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Agreeing with arguments the New Civil Liberties Alliance made in its amicus curiae brief, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. U.S. that the government’s collection of location data via geofences is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. Geofencing uses the location history of your cell phone or other digital devices to determine when you entered or left a specific area surrounded by virtual “fences.” Geofence warrants allow the government to gather location histories of everyone who happened to be near the scene of a crime at a particular time, no matter the reason they were in the vicinity.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had rejected Okello Chatrie’s motion to suppress evidence based on a police geofence warrant that happened to capture his location using data from Google Location History on his phone. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling, sending the case back for the Fourth Circuit to decide if the government violated Chatrie’s Fourth Amendment rights at each stage of the warrant, which NCLA argues it did.
“Contrary to the Government’s view, an individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy in the information Location History collects about this cell phone’s—meaning his own—movements,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the Court. “The police invade that expectation, and thus conduct a search, when they acquire that information, even though for only a limited period of time and even though via a third-party tech company.”
Today’s decision reaffirms the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling, which declared people have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the whole of their movements over time, noting that an individual “does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection” by going out in public. A person’s geofenced location history is precise and detailed, a window into his or her private life. When the government seizes that data, it is conducting a “search” that NCLA argues violates the Fourth Amendment right to keep one’s movements private.
NCLA pointed out that geofence warrants resemble the reviled “general warrants” of the colonial era that motivated the Founders to pass the Fourth Amendment in the first place. They defy its requirement that warrants only be issued with probable cause and a description of “the place to be searched, and the persons … to be seized.”
The Fourth Circuit held in this case that the police warrant’s taking two hours of Chatrie’s location history only showed a “single trip in isolation” and could not reveal “his habits routines and associations,” thus deciding it did not violate Carpenter. That reasoning mischaracterized Carpenter’s logic and disregarded how powerful geofence data is, dramatically understating how much it can reveal about a person’s life. Whether the data collected revealed something private is beside the point. It definitely had the potential to do so. The government has invaded Chatrie’s privacy either way. If nothing private was revealed, that’s just happenstance.
NCLA released the following statements:
“The Court correctly recognized that government’s warrantless, suspicion-less, and probable cause-less collection of individuals’ location history constitutes a Fourth Amendment search—regardless of what that search turns up. The Court’s welcome ruling reaffirms that the Carpenter case was not an outlier, but a watershed decision that must guide courts confronting the privacy threats posed by continuously evolving surveillance technologies.”
— Andreia Trifoi, Staff Attorney, NCLA
“In Chatrie v. U.S., the Supreme Court balked at allowing geofence warrants to ‘round up the usual suspects.’ Instead, it properly refused to apply the third-party doctrine to cell phone location history. Just because Google has location history from people’s phones does not free the government to obtain that history outside the strictures of the Fourth Amendment. NCLA will be watching this case carefully on remand to the Fourth Circuit.”
— Mark Chenoweth, President and Chief Legal Officer, NCLA
For more information visit the amicus page here.
ABOUT NCLA
NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights.
Joe Martyak New Civil Liberties Alliance 703-403-1111 joe.martyak@ncla.legal
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