Supreme Court Reviews Police Use of Cell Location Data to Find Criminals
The New York Times • • general
Key Points:
- In 2019, a gunpoint robbery at Call Federal Credit Union in Virginia led police to use a geofence warrant, collecting location data from all cellphones near the bank to identify and convict suspect Okello T. Chatrie.
- Geofence warrants, which gather data from multiple devices in a specific area, have become popular with law enforcement but face criticism for potentially infringing on Americans' privacy and constitutional rights.
- Chatrie is challenging the use of geofence data in his conviction, with the U.S. Supreme Court set to hear the case to determine how Fourth Amendment protections apply to modern digital surveillance technologies.
- This case marks the first major Supreme Court review since 2018 of privacy expectations related to cellphone location data, following a ruling that generally requires warrants for government collection of such data from cell towers.
