The police told Jorge Molina his phone was at the murder scene. “One hundred percent, without a doubt,” the detective said. Molina was twenty-three years old, sitting in an interrogation room in Avondale, Arizona, trying to understand why four officers had walked into his Macy’s warehouse job that morning, handcuffed him, and driven him to the Fourth Avenue Jail. He had never met Joseph Knight, the twenty-nine-year-old aircraft mechanic shot nine times outside his apartment nine months earlier. He had no weapon. He had no motive. He had a Google account. Molina had lent an old phone to his mother’s ex-boyfriend, Marcos Cruz-Gaeta, a man with a history of violence and an active warrant in California. The phone was still logged into Molina’s Google account. When Avondale police hit a dead end on the Knight murder, they obtained a geofence warrant directing Google to identify every device within 150 meters of the crime scene during the killing. Google returned data on nineteen devices. Molina’s account was one of them. Police matched his account to a white Honda spotted on surveillance footage and concluded they had their suspect. He spent six days in jail. Prosecutors told the press he was the primary suspect in a highly publicized murder. His alibi, confirmed by multiple witnesses, went unaddressed for days. When police finally released him, the damage had calcified. He dropped out of school. He lost his job. His car, impounded during the investigation, was repossessed. He still fails background checks. Cruz-Gaeta was arrested for the murder months later in California. This is not a story about one wrongful arrest in Arizona. This is a story about the Geofence Blind Spot: the constitutional question of whether the government can search every phone in a room to find a single suspect. On January 16, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to answer that question. Chatrie v. United States is the first case in which the Court will determine whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth and Fifth Circuits have issued irreconcilable rulings. A decision is expected by summer 2026. Every attorney whose client’s location data has ever been collected by Google has a stake in the outcome. Direct Answer Attorneys with any pending or prior matter involving government-obtained location evidence must brief the Chatrie suppression argument now, before the Court rules. The circuit split means the constitutional status of geofence warrants is genuinely unresolved: the Fifth Circuit held them categorically unconstitutional as modern general warrants; the Fourth Circuit held they involve no Fourth Amendment search at all. The Court’s decision will determine whether location data that users affirmatively shared with Google receives the same constitutional protection the Court extended to automatically collected cell-site data in Carpenter v. United States. Practitioners in criminal defense, immigration, civil rights, and any practice area where government investigations involve location evidence cannot wait for the opinion to assess client exposure. The time to evaluate is now. How a Geofence Warrant Searches Everyone A traditional search warrant identifies a specific person or place and requires probable cause to believe evidence of a crime will be found there. A geofence warrant inverts that process. It identifies a geographic area and a time window, then demands that a technology company, almost always Google, search its entire location database to identify every device present within those coordinates during that period. The warrant does not name a suspect. It names a location. Compliance follows a three-step process. At Step One, Google searches its Sensorvault database and provides law enforcement with anonymized data for every device within the geofence. In Chatrie’s case, the company returned data on nineteen devices within 150 meters of the Virginia credit union during a two-hour window. At Step Two, law enforcement selects a subset and requests expanded location data over a broader timeframe. Detective Hylton requested expanded data for nine of the nineteen devices. Google provided 680 data points from those nine accounts across the two-hour period. At Step Three, law enforcement requests identifying information for specific accounts. Hylton requested subscriber information for three accounts. One belonged to Okello Chatrie. That identification led to his arrest and conviction for the robbery. Google is “the most common recipient and the only one known to respond” to geofence warrants, as the Fifth Circuit noted in United States v. Smith. Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, and Uber have all received geofence warrant requests. From 2017 to 2018, geofence warrant requests to Google increased over 1,500%. By 2019, Google received approximately 180 requests per week, totaling roughly 9,000 for the year. That number rose to 11,500 in 2020. By 2021, geofence warrants comprised more than 25% of all warrant requests Google received in the United States. The scale matters for a reason beyond raw numbers. Each warrant sweeps in every device within the geofence. In a dense urban area, a 150-meter radius captures apartment buildings, medical offices, houses of worship, and public streets. A congregant attending a service across the street from a crime scene becomes a data point. The warrant does not distinguish between the suspect and everyone else. It collects first and filters later. The Circuit Split the Court Must Resolve Chatrie v. United States and United States v. Smith began as near-twins, as the Harvard Law Review observed. Both defendants were convicted of robbery. Both district courts denied suppression motions. Both defendants challenged geofence-derived evidence on appeal. Both circuits addressed whether geofence collection constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. The agreement ends there. The Fifth Circuit, in Smith, held that geofence warrants “are modern-day general warrants and are unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.” The court found that users retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in location data, noting that “the potential intrusiveness of even a snapshot of precise location data should not be understated.” The opinion identified the core danger as “the potential for ‘permeating police surveillance'” enabled by warrants that sweep entire geographic areas. The court concluded that no warrant could satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement for a search of this nature, because the search inherently targets everyone within a geographic boundary without individualized suspicion. The Fourth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion. En banc, fourteen of fifteen judges affirmed the district court’s denial of suppression in a one-sentence per curiam opinion, accompanied by eight concurrences and one dissent spanning over 100 pages. The core reasoning: Chatrie voluntarily opted into Google Location History, a service that is off by default and requires affirmative activation. Because the data was voluntarily shared with a third party, the court held, Chatrie lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy. The geofence collection did not constitute a search. No warrant was required. The Fourth Circuit viewed the geofence output as “a brief glimpse into [someone’s] whereabouts” unlikely to “offer insight into his habits, routines, and associations.” The Fifth Circuit rejected that characterization directly, calling Google’s location data far more precise than the cell-site location information at issue in Carpenter, capable of pinpointing a device within meters and even measuring elevation. Several Fourth Circuit judges noted the same precision in their concurrences, observing that even a brief snapshot of location data can reveal visits to a church, a doctor’s office, or a political gathering. The Government’s Strongest Argument The government’s position in Chatrie is not a strawman. It tracks a real doctrinal distinction that separates this case from Carpenter. In Carpenter, the Court held that cell-site location information receives Fourth Amendment protection because cell phones are “indispensable to participation in modern society” and because CSLI is collected automatically whenever a phone connects to a cell network. Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that such data “is not truly ‘shared’ as one normally understands the term,” because the collection happens without any affirmative act by the user. The choice is binary: own a cell phone and generate location data, or abandon an essential technology. Google Location History operates differently. The service is off by default. Activating it requires navigating to settings and toggling the feature on. Google’s own filings in the case indicate that roughly one-third of all Google users opted in. Two-thirds did not. That ratio is the government’s strongest data point. It demonstrates that Location History is not a condition of device ownership, not an unavoidable byproduct of participation in modern society, and not a cost that every phone user silently pays. A two-thirds non-participation rate means the technology works without it. The government argues this distinction is dispositive: unlike CSLI, which every phone generates involuntarily, Location History data exists only because users chose to create it. The argument has force. The third-party doctrine, established in Smith v. Maryland (1978) and United States v. Miller(1976), holds that individuals who voluntarily convey information to third parties assume the risk that the third party will reveal it to the government. Carpenter carved an exception for CSLI because the collection was automatic and pervasive. If the Court accepts that Location History is genuinely voluntary, Carpenter’s exception may not extend to geofence data at all. The flaw in the government’s reasoning lies in what “voluntary” means in practice. The Fifth Circuit addressed this directly. Opting into Location History occurs through a setup process that presents multiple permissions simultaneously, often during initial device configuration when users are clicking through screens to reach basic phone functionality. As the Fifth Circuit noted, enabling location features through opaque opt-in processes embedded in device setup is not the same as knowingly exposing one’s comprehensive movement history to government scrutiny. Chatrie’s reply brief characterized the choice as “an opt-in buried in setup screens” that “no reasonable person associates with future government surveillance.” The practical question is whether a checkbox during phone setup constitutes the kind of knowing, voluntary disclosure that extinguishes Fourth Amendment protection. The Fourth Circuit’s own judges made the point. Judge Wynn, concurring in the en banc decision, wrote that even a brief snapshot of location data “can reveal sensitive information, such as visits to a church, doctor, or political activities.” Several concurring judges who voted to affirm on good-faith grounds explicitly declined to endorse the panel’s holding that no search occurred. The en banc court’s one-sentence per curiam opinion carefully avoided ruling on the constitutional merits, affirming only the judgment, not the reasoning. Fourteen judges agreed on the result. They could not agree on why. Where This Analysis Is Weakest Google announced in December 2023 that it would migrate Location History data from its centralized Sensorvault database to local device storage. If Google completes this migration and no longer maintains a centralized location database, geofence warrants lose their target. The constitutional question survives. The practical impact may not. The status of this migration remains unclear. The Harvard Law Review noted in February 2025 that “the status of Google’s pronounced changes is unclear.” Warrants may still issue for data previously stored in the Sensorvault. Other companies may develop centralized location databases that attract similar warrant activity. The constitutional principle transcends any single company’s policy. But practitioners should recognize that a favorable ruling in Chatrie may arrive after the technological conditions that created the case have shifted. A second vulnerability: even if the Court holds that geofence warrants require Fourth Amendment protection, the good-faith exception may swallow the rule. Both the Fourth and Fifth Circuits applied the good-faith exception to deny suppression despite finding (or assuming) constitutional violations. If the Court declares geofence warrants unconstitutional but leaves the good-faith exception intact for warrants issued before the ruling, the immediate practical impact for defendants with existing convictions is limited. The ruling’s primary force would be prospective, governing future warrant applications. What This Means for Your Practice Oral argument is expected this spring, with a decision before the Court’s term ends in summer 2026. The window for assessing client exposure is open now. Criminal defense. Any case in which the government obtained location evidence through a geofence warrant is subject to a suppression motion invoking Chatrie. The circuit split means the argument is available in every jurisdiction. In the Fifth Circuit, the argument has binding authority. In the Fourth Circuit, the en banc decision’s procedural posture, affirming on good-faith grounds without endorsing the panel’s no-search holding, leaves room for renewed challenge. In every other circuit, the question is open. File the motion. Preserve the issue. The Court’s decision will apply retroactively to cases on direct appeal. Immigration. Federal immigration authorities have used geofence warrants to identify individuals near border areas and employment sites. Any removal proceeding in which location evidence contributed to the government’s case carries Chatrie exposure. The lower standard of proof in immigration proceedings means location data may already be embedded in an immigration record without challenge. Civil rights and First Amendment. Following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August 2020, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives obtained at least twelve geofence warrants directing Google to identify devices near property damage incidents during the Kenosha, Wisconsin protests, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented. These warrants covered areas as large as a football field, capturing location data on peaceful demonstrators who never approached the targeted locations. The chilling effect is structural: if attending a protest means your phone’s location enters a government database, the cost of political participation includes surveillance exposure. Chatrie’s outcome will determine whether that cost carries constitutional weight. Corporate investigations. Clients under federal investigation for white-collar offenses should assume that geofence warrants may have been used to place employees at specific locations during relevant time periods. The discovery obligation extends to requesting disclosure of whether geofence-derived evidence contributed to the investigation. Three Steps for This Week First, audit pending matters for location evidence. Review every active case in which government-obtained location data contributed to charges, enforcement actions, or investigative leads. Ask specifically whether that data came from a geofence warrant. Many defendants learned about geofence evidence only during proceedings because law enforcement is not required to disclose the method of collection proactively. If the answer is unknown, the discovery request addresses it. Second, brief the Chatrie argument now. Do not wait for the opinion. File suppression motions that preserve the issue for any case currently on direct appeal. The motion should invoke both the Fifth Circuit’s holding in Smith and Carpenter’s reasoning on comprehensive location tracking. In jurisdictions outside the Fourth and Fifth Circuits, the argument is entirely open. Raising it preserves the client’s right to benefit from a favorable ruling. Third, advise clients on Location History exposure. Every client who opted into Google Location History has created a record of their physical movements accessible to law enforcement through geofence warrants, at least until Google completes its migration to local storage. Counsel clients under investigation or in sensitive industries to audit their Google account settings. The opt-in decision made during phone setup now carries legal consequences they did not contemplate when they tapped “Accept.”

Originally published on LinkedIn Newsletter: The Technology Blind Spot