The Liberty Daily 
(The Epoch Times)—The Supreme Court wrestled on April 27 with the constitutionality of police using cell phone location data while investigating crimes.
During oral argument, the justices asked attorneys about how much privacy Americans could expect, as well as how authorities could obtain geofencing warrants, or warrants for cell phone data transmitted from a specified location.
The case, known as Chatrie v. United States, centered on a Virginia man’s allegation that police violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.
Police had secured a warrant that allowed them to obtain multiple sets of data from Google, including one that revealed Okello Chatrie’s proximity to a 2019 bank robbery, and he was ultimately convicted of the crime.
Both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito seemed skeptical that Chatrie was entitled to privacy if he willingly gave his information to the tech giant.
“If you don’t want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off … so what’s the issue?” Roberts asked at the beginning of argument.
“It’s not a question of shutting it off, it’s a question of turning it on,” Alito said. “And according to the government, your client had to go through multiple steps in order to turn it on.”
Both touched on a legal concept known as the third party doctrine, which says that people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy for information they give to third parties.
The Justice Department has used this doctrine to challenge Chatrie’s arguments.
Adam G. Unikowsky, an attorney for Chatrie, suggested that voluntarily exchanging information with companies was not the same as consenting to disclosing that information.
Big tech companies such as Google offered amicus briefs backing some of Chatrie’s arguments and suggesting that users should have more protection from the government obtaining their data.
Google said, however, that it changed its service so that users who turned on location history would only have it saved on their mobile device.
“Google now lacks the ability to search for and produce user Location History to law enforcement and Google no longer has the ability to respond to geofence warrants,” the company said in an amicus brief.
At one point, Alito noted that Google’s features had changed and wondered why the court even took the case.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed more sympathetic to Chatrie’s case than others and indicated concern about how far authorities could go in obtaining data.
More specifically, she was concerned that the government could obtain Google documents, information from calendars, and photos.
“Because people take their phone now everywhere, including, I suspect, some people to the bathroom, you really have no idea what information, private information … It‘ll follow you to a brothel, it’ll follow you to a cannabis shop, it’ll follow you to just about anywhere where there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy, correct?” she asked Unikowsky.
Chatrie has cited a similar case, known as Carpenter v. United States, from 2018.
In that case, a majority of the court said that another man, Timothy Carpenter, was entitled to Fourth Amendment protections to cell-site location data.
The majority was joined by Justices Roberts, Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, while Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Gorsuch filed dissenting opinions.
Alito suggested that case was different because the defendant had no choice but to allow his data to be obtained by a cell phone tower.
Kagan, meanwhile, suggested that Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin was trying to make that case look more different than it was from Chatrie’s.
One of Chatrie’s main arguments was that the government cast a wide net, initially seeking data on multiple devices—albeit in an anonymized fashion.
They argued that searches had to be narrow or particularized in order to be constitutional.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh defended the detective involved with Chatrie’s case, stating that the detective “should be applauded in terms of narrowing this down.”
Roberts and Gorsuch seemed concerned about how far the government could go if the Justice Department won the case.
“To prevent surveillance of sensitive locations, you have to rely on the fact that people are going to turn off something that many if not most people find is an important service?” he asked Feigin.
