By John Ellis [1]

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Editor’s Note: Okello Chatrie’s case began as a 2019 Virginia credit-union robbery investigation and reached the Supreme Court as a major test of geofence warrants. On June 29, 2026, in Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, a five-Justice opinion authored by Justice Kagan held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain Google Location History through a geofence warrant. Justice Gorsuch concurred in the judgment, giving the threshold search holding six votes, though only five Justices joined the Court’s Katz/Carpenter rationale. The decision settles the threshold search question that divided lower courts, but leaves probable cause, particularity, reasonableness, and good faith for the Fourth Circuit on remand. Defenders and CJA practitioners litigating digital location evidence should assess the implications immediately.

Introduction

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Chatrie v. United States that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain a person’s historical Google Location History through a geofence warrant. The decision settles a threshold question that divided courts for years and eliminates the government’s most common argument for avoiding Fourth Amendment scrutiny altogether. For years, prosecutors argued that because Google stored the data, obtaining it did not implicate the Fourth Amendment at all. Chatrie rejects that premise. Location History is not just another third-party business record. It is highly precise, frequently recorded, retrospectively searchable, and user-facing in a way that makes it closer to a personal digital journal than a carrier’s internal network log. The Court stopped short of declaring geofence warrants categorically unconstitutional. Whether any particular warrant satisfies probable cause, particularity, and reasonableness is now the central question. Those issues return to the Fourth Circuit on remand, along with the unresolved question whether the good-faith exception applies.

The Facts

In 2019, police investigating a robbery at a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, served Google with a geofence warrant seeking Location History data for every device within 150 meters of the crime scene during a one-hour window. The warrant used Google’s familiar three-step process:

Step 1: Google produced anonymized location data for all 19 devices within the geofence.

Step 2: Officers selected 9 devices for additional anonymized data during an expanded two-hour period, including locations inside and outside the original geofence.

Step 3: Officers narrowed the list again, and Google produced identifying information, specifically  the names, emails, and phone numbers for three users.

The warrant return from Google included information about a device connected to Chatrie and he moved to suppress. The district court found that the geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment but admitted the evidence under the good-faith exception. A divided Fourth Circuit panel affirmed on different grounds, holding that no search had occurred because Chatrie lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google. The en banc Fourth Circuit then affirmed by an equally divided court. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on the Fourth Amendment question, declined to take up the exclusionary-rule issue, and resolved only the threshold search issue.

Google Location History: Why It Matters

Chatrie turns on what makes Google Location History different from the cell site location information (CSLI) at issue in Carpenter. In Carpenter, the Court held that the government conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it obtains a person’s historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier without a warrant. The Court treated the comparison this way:

	CSLI (Carpenter)	Google Location History (Chatrie)
Precision	About 1/8 to 4 square miles	About 20 meters; may reveal elevation or floor level
Frequency	About 101 records per day	About 720 records per day, roughly every two minutes
User relationship to data	Generally invisible to the user; not ordinarily accessed by the user	User-facing Timeline/personal record, accessible through Google services
Government use	Retrospective tracking of a known suspect	Retrospective identification of unknown people within a place and time

At the time of the warrant, Location History was stored on Google’s servers, not the user’s device, though users could access and interact with it through Google Maps, Timeline, and related services. In July 2025, Google moved Location History storage to individual devices and represented that it can no longer respond to traditional geofence warrants seeking users’ historical Location History. That technical change may reduce the number of future Google Location History geofence cases, but it does not reduce Chatrie’s importance. The opinion’s reasoning applies to digital tools that let the government reconstruct people’s movements retrospectively with precision — especially where the government begins with a place and searches backward through everyone who was there.

Why the Court Found a Fourth Amendment Search

The majority did not break new ground so much as apply existing ground more forcefully. Building on Carpenter, the Court concluded that Location History triggers the same constitutional protection as historical cell-site record. The Court rejected the three government arguments standing in the way.

1. Carpenter Controls—And Then Some

The majority held that the privacy concerns that drove Carpenter apply as well or better to Location History. Location History is more precise than CSLI, records more frequently, and can reconstruct movements across public and private spaces with little effort. It also has a stronger personal character: unlike CSLI, which most users never see, Location History is something Google users may consult as a Timeline or record of their own movements. That distinction matters. The Court analogized Location History to other private digital materials — emails, documents, photographs, calendars — that users may store on a company’s servers but reasonably understand as their own. The Fourth Amendment does not disappear merely because a person’s private digital record lives in the cloud.

2. A Short Time Window Does Not Avoid the Fourth Amendment

The government argued that two hours of location data is too little to trigger Carpenter. The Court rejected that argument. A brief window of location information can still reveal intensely private facts: a visit to a home, medical office, school, place of worship, political event, or attorney’s office.

The Court also rejected the idea of a Fourth Amendment grace period in which police may freely obtain some limited amount of location data before constitutional protections apply. That does not mean duration will never matter. Duration may still matter when courts evaluate scope, particularity, probable cause, and reasonableness. But duration does not decide the threshold question whether obtaining Location History is a search.

The Court’s concern was especially strong because officers were not merely following someone for two hours in real time. They were selecting a slice from a continuous, retrospective location database. The constitutional problem is not just what the government ultimately chose to view; it is the government’s ability to access an all-encompassing database and decide, after the fact, which people, places, and time periods to inspect.

3. The Third-Party Doctrine Does Not Apply

The government also argued that Chatrie lost any Fourth Amendment interest because he enabled Location History and Google stored the data. The Court rejected that argument too. Following Carpenter, the Court held that cell-phone location data is not truly shared in the ordinary third-party-doctrine sense. Users do not expose Location History to Google because they want Google to inspect their movements. The exposure happens because the user is using ordinary smartphone services. The Court also emphasized that enabling Location History is not meaningfully voluntary in the way the government claimed: Google repeatedly prompts users to turn it on, Android users may be told their devices will not work correctly without it, and the prompts do not clearly disclose the frequency, precision, or law-enforcement consequences of the data collection.

The broader point is important for future cases. The Court refused to decide Fourth Amendment protection app by app, feature by feature, or click by click. Modern cell phones are used through services, apps, cloud storage, permissions, and prompts. Treating every interaction with a digital service as a waiver of constitutional privacy would make the Fourth Amendment turn on the architecture of commercial technology.

What the Court Did Not Decide

The Court did not hold that all geofence warrants are unconstitutional. It held that obtaining Location History through a geofence warrant is a search. That means the government must now defend the search under the Fourth Amendment instead of avoiding the Amendment altogether. On remand, the Fourth Circuit must decide whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment at each stage of the three-step process. The key questions include:

Probable cause: Was there probable cause to search every device in the geofence, or only probable cause to believe that a crime occurred at that location?

Particularity: Did the warrant particularly describe the place to be searched and the things to be seized at each stage, or did it leave too much discretion to officers?

Reasonableness: Was the three-step process constitutionally reasonable, especially when steps two and three allowed officers to expand the time period, obtain data outside the geofence, and choose which users would receive more scrutiny?

Good Faith: Even if the warrant was unconstitutional, does United States v. Leon save the evidence? The Supreme Court did not decide that question and left it for the Fourth Circuit to reconsider in light of the new Fourth Amendment holding.

The deeper unresolved tension is that traditional warrants usually begin with a suspect or a specific thing to be searched. Geofence warrants begin with a place and work backward through the data of everyone present. Whether that inversion can satisfy probable cause and particularity is the question that will define the next phase of litigation.

Practice Pointers

Chatrie may arrive near the end of the traditional Google Location History geofence-warrant era, but it is not merely a backward-looking decision. In legacy Google cases, the government can no longer avoid Fourth Amendment scrutiny by arguing that no search occurred. The fight now shifts to probable cause, particularity, reasonableness, and good faith. Defense counsel should begin by identifying exactly what data was obtained, from whom, and when. For pre-July 2025 Google warrants, counsel should request and scrutinize the full warrant materials, Google returns, officer communications, narrowing decisions, and any documentation showing how the government moved from step one to step two and from step two to step three.

The strongest suppression arguments will focus on the mismatch between probable cause to investigate a crime scene and probable cause to search the digital location records of every person who happened to be nearby. Counsel should press whether the warrant gave officers unchecked discretion over whose data was expanded, whose identity was disclosed, and what criteria governed those decisions.

Prosecutors will rely heavily on United States v. Leon. But novelty alone should not excuse suspicionless digital sweeps, especially where warrants failed to impose meaningful limits, lacked individualized probable cause, or left the narrowing process to officer discretion. The good-faith fight should be tied to the warrant’s actual defects: overbreadth, lack of particularity, insufficient probable cause, and the absence of a neutral magistrate’s control over later stages of the search.

Even if old-style Google geofence warrants fade, Chatrie should remain central to future challenges involving geolocation evidence. That includes automated license plate reader databases, app-based location data, advertising identifiers, connected vehicles, wearable devices, mobile-payment location trails, and other tools that allow the government to reconstruct movements retrospectively with precision. The core defense argument remains the same: geofence-style searches invert the traditional warrant model by searching the many to find the few.

The Concurrences and Dissents

The separate opinions matter because they identify the arguments likely to shape future litigation: innocent bystanders, officer discretion, property-based theories, voluntariness, the third-party doctrine, and the validity of multi-step digital warrants.

Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, joined the majority in full but wrote separately to say she would have gone further. She concluded that at least steps two and three violated the Fourth Amendment because the warrant gave officers too much discretion and too little magistrate supervision. Her concurrence is especially useful for challenging later-stage geofence procedures, where police expand the search and obtain identifying information without clear judicially imposed criteria.

Justice Gorsuch concurred in the judgment on narrower, property-based grounds. He agreed that the government’s examination of Chatrie’s Location History was a search but would have reached that conclusion through the Fourth Amendment’s protection of persons, houses, papers, and effects rather than through Katz’s reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test. For defense counsel, Gorsuch’s concurrence offers an alternative theory: digital records may remain a person’s protected effects even when entrusted to a third party for limited purposes.

Justice Alito, joined in part by Justices Thomas and Barrett, dissented. He argued that Location History was voluntarily disclosed to Google, that the third-party doctrine should apply, and that the police did not need a warrant to obtain the data. He also warned that the majority’s reasoning could destabilize the boundary between Carpenter and ordinary third-party records.

Justice Barrett dissented separately. She emphasized that she did not reject Carpenter but agreed with Justice Alito that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in data about his public movements that he voluntarily disclosed to Google.

The lineup matters. Justice Kagan wrote for Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. Justice Gorsuch supplied a sixth vote for the conclusion that the government conducted a search, but not for the majority’s reasoning. That gives defenders a six-vote search result in geolocation cases, while leaving room for future fights over rationale, scope, remedy, and non-Google technologies.

Bottom Line

Chatrie is the most significant Fourth Amendment decision since Carpenter. Obtaining Google Location History through a geofence warrant is a search. That threshold question is closed. But the decision does not end geofence litigation. It starts the next phase. The government must now prove that these warrants, which search the many to find the few, satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause, particularity, and reasonableness. And where the warrants fail, courts must decide whether Leon nonetheless saves the evidence. For defense attorneys, the litigation starts now. The fight is no longer about whether the Fourth Amendment applies. It is about whether the government’s search can survive it.

[i] District court opinion: United States v. Chatrie, 590 F. Supp. 3d 901 (E.D. Va. 2022). Fourth Circuit panel: United States v. Chatrie, 107 F.4th 319 (4th Cir. 2024). En banc: United States v. Chatrie, 136 F.4th 100 (4th Cir. 2025). Supreme Court: Chatrie v. United States, 609 U.S. ___ (2026).

[ii] The Supreme Court opinion describes Google’s three-step geofence process: anonymized geofence data at step one, expanded anonymized data for a narrowed subset at step two, and identifying information for a further narrowed subset at step three. For background on the three-step warrant process, see Google Data and Geofence Warrant Process.
[iii] Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018).

[1]  John C. Ellis, Jr. is a National Coordinating Discovery Attorney for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Defender Services Office. In this capacity, he provides litigation support and e-discovery assistance on complex criminal cases to defense teams around the country. Before entering private practice, Mr. Ellis spent 13 years as a trial attorney and supervisory attorney with Federal Defenders of San Diego, Inc. He also serves as a digital forensic consultant and expert.