SCOTUS: geofence warrants are Fourth Amendment searches

Our Take

Geofence warrants and automated license plate readers are cousins in the same surveillance family: both work backwards from "let's see who was nearby" instead of forwards from actual suspicion. As this video from Verified Privacy VPN lays out, police with no suspect asked Google to hand over every phone that pinged near a bank, then narrowed a haystack down to one man. That's not traditional police work — it's a dragnet, and now the Supreme Court has said so, ruling 6-3 that this kind of reverse search counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment.

Flock Safety's ALPR network runs on the same basic logic. Instead of casting a net for phones in a radius, it casts a net for every car that drives past a camera, timestamped, logged, and often shared across agencies and states with little independent oversight. No court has yet drawn as bright a line around plate reader dragnets as this ruling draws around geofence warrants, but the underlying question is identical: should the government be allowed to search everyone first and find a suspect later?

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for breaking this down into something people will actually watch. If you want to see how far this kind of tracking has already spread near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather push back on it where you live, our take-action page has concrete next steps.