For years the FBI swept up innocent Americans in warrantless digital dragnets – no suspect, no probable cause, just everyone nearby.
The Supreme Court just ruled that practice is a constitutional search – and the government needed a warrant before it ever started.
What the justices decided Monday means the FBI's secret location surveillance playbook is finished.
The Case That Changed Everything
A credit union in Midlothian, Virginia was robbed in May 2019.
Police had surveillance footage of the suspect – but no name, no leads, and no suspect.
So they went to a Virginia magistrate and got something called a geofence warrant.
The warrant ordered Google to hand over location data for every phone within 150 meters of the credit union, covering a 30-minute window on each side of the robbery.
Google dug through its database of hundreds of millions of users, flagged every device that pinged inside that digital fence, and handed officers a narrowing list until investigators zeroed in on Okello Chatrie – whose data showed him entering the area ten minutes before the robbery and heading out immediately after.
Chatrie was convicted.
But here's what the case exposed about how the government has been operating: those Location History records track your phone every two minutes, can pinpoint you within 20 meters, and even know what floor of a building you're standing on.
That is not a routine business record.
That is a detailed map of your life.
The Court Just Drew a Line the Government Cannot Cross Without a Warrant
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Monday in Chatrie v. United States.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion.
The justices held that when police access your Location History from Google, they are conducting a Fourth Amendment search.
Full stop.
That means they need a proper warrant supported by probable cause – not a fishing expedition that sweeps up hundreds of innocent Americans to find one suspect.
The government had argued Chatrie gave up his privacy when he voluntarily let Google track his location.
The Court rejected that entirely.
Americans don't hand Google their location data to give it to federal investigators – they turn it on to get restaurant recommendations and avoid traffic.
The Court also knocked down the "short time period" argument.
The government claimed two hours of location data was no big deal.
The Court pointed to United States v. Jones – which established that even short-term monitoring can provide a wealth of detail about a person's "familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations."
Two hours is enough.
This Is the Federal Surveillance Dragnet the Founders Warned About
Here's what geofence warrants actually are in practice.
Federal investigators draw a circle on a map around a crime scene.
They have no suspect.
They have no probable cause connected to any individual.
They order Google to search through the location data of every American who happened to be nearby – joggers, nurses, retirees, church visitors, everyone – and hand over that data in searchable form.
Then investigators sift through it until they find someone whose movement pattern looks suspicious.
The Fourth Amendment was written specifically to prohibit this.
The Founders called them "general warrants" – the British used them to ransack colonists' homes without identifying a specific target.
What the federal government has been doing with geofence warrants is the digital version of those general warrants, scaled to hundreds of millions of people.
The Court has now said: that is a search, and it requires proper constitutional authorization before it begins.
What Comes Next
The ruling sends Chatrie's case back to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether the specific warrant used meets the Fourth Amendment's probable cause and particularity requirements.
That fight will continue for months.
More importantly, the ruling establishes that a constitutionally sufficient basis for the search must be demonstrated before any geofence warrant is issued.
Justice Alito dissented, warning the ruling would "send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine" and create uncertainty in lower courts.
He's right that it's seismic.
The government built a mass surveillance machine out of technology Americans use to order pizza and get directions – and operated it for years without ever asking whether the Constitution permitted it.
Good law enforcement doesn't need a dragnet.
It needs probable cause, a real warrant, and a judge who reads it.
The Founders understood that a government powerful enough to search your life without permission is a government powerful enough to destroy it.
The Court just put that principle back on the books.
Sources:
- Jeff Charles, "Supreme Court Just Decided How Police Can Use Your Location Data," Townhall, June 29, 2026.
- Amy Howe, "Court rules that law enforcement's use of 'geofence warrant' was a 'search,'" SCOTUSblog, June 29, 2026.
- Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, Supreme Court of the United States, June 29, 2026.
- Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018).
