Supreme Court rules geofence warrants are Fourth Amendment searches

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for laying out the Chatrie case in plain terms: cops with no suspect asked Google to hand over every phone that pinged near a Virginia bank during a robbery, then worked backward from that haystack to a person. If the Court really did call that a search requiring a warrant, that's a meaningful check on one flavor of suspicionless bulk collection — the kind where law enforcement casts a wide net over everyone in an area and sorts out the innocent later.

We'd just note the obvious parallel to what we track every day. Flock Safety's ALPR network does the same backward-working trick, just with license plates instead of phone pings: cameras log every car that passes, no warrant, no individualized suspicion, and that database gets queried after the fact to see who was 'near' something. Courts are only now starting to grapple with location dragnets built from phones. ALPR networks have been running the same playbook for years with far less legal scrutiny.

Watch the video for the full case breakdown, then check our map to see how many of these cameras are already logging your street, and hit take action if you want to push back on the systems that don't yet have a Chatrie ruling to slow them down.