Overview
- The justices opened arguments Monday in Chatrie v. United States, a case that will resolve a split over whether broad geofence requests for Google location logs are Fourth Amendment searches.
- The case arises from a 2019 Virginia bank robbery where police used a geofence warrant to pull Google Location History, identified Okello Chatrie, and later secured a conviction after his guilty plea.
- The Justice Department, represented by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, argues no search occurred because users chose to share their location data with Google.
- Chatrie’s lawyers point to the 2018 Carpenter ruling that required warrants for certain cell‑site records and note Google’s data can place a phone within about 3 meters every two minutes.
- Google now stores Location History on users’ devices rather than on its servers, which the company says stops it from answering geofence warrants with that dataset but leaves the broader legal question for the Court.