The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in a case that asks whether police can use a single warrant to sweep up the cellphone location data of every person near a crime scene, a technique that helped convict a Virginia bank robber but has divided federal appeals courts over its constitutionality.

The case centers on Okello Chatrie, who made off with $195,000 from the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, in May 2019. Police served a geofence warrant on Google, asking the company to hand over location-history data for devices near the bank around the time of the robbery. Google identified a handful of devices in the area, and Chatrie's cellphone was among them.

From there, investigators obtained a search warrant for Chatrie's home. They found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. But his lawyers argued on appeal that the geofence warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights, and the case has now reached the nation's highest court.

A tool that works, and that worries

Geofence warrants are a relatively new investigative technique. Rather than targeting a known suspect's phone, police ask a technology company, typically Google, for information about every device present in a defined geographic area during a specific time window. The approach has proved effective. Prosecutors in California, Georgia, and North Carolina credit geofence warrants with helping identify suspects in killings where surveillance cameras failed to capture faces or license plates.

Investigators also used geofence warrants to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who entered the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, and in the search for the person who planted pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.

But the technique sweeps broadly. Every person who happened to carry a cellphone near a crime scene gets caught in the net, churchgoers, commuters, shoppers, bystanders. That breadth is exactly what alarms civil-liberties advocates and, increasingly, judges who see echoes of the "general warrants" the Founders banned when they ratified the Fourth Amendment in 1791.

The Washington Examiner reported that the case, Chatrie v. United States, squarely presents the question of whether executing a geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. Chatrie's lawyers put the stakes bluntly in their petition:

"Using a geofence warrant, law enforcement may request information regarding all people who were at a sensitive location, an abortion clinic, a protest, a political party's convention, at a particular time."

That framing captures why this case matters well beyond one bank robbery in suburban Richmond. The question before the justices is not whether Chatrie deserved to be caught. He did. The question is whether the method used to catch him is one the Constitution permits the government to deploy against everyone in a given area, without any prior suspicion of any of them.

Lower courts split on the answer

The federal courts below could not agree. A federal judge who reviewed Chatrie's case agreed that the geofence warrant violated his rights. But the judge allowed the evidence anyway, ruling that the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly, a "good faith" exception. Fox News reported that investigators had identified 19 cellphones near the bank at the time of the robbery, including Chatrie's, using the warrant. U.S. District Judge Hannah Lauck, who sentenced Chatrie, rejected a request for a lower sentence, citing "too many victims."

The federal appeals court in Richmond upheld the conviction in what the Associated Press described as a fractured ruling. Meanwhile, the federal appeals court in New Orleans reached the opposite conclusion in a separate case, ruling that geofence warrants "are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment." That circuit split, two appeals courts reaching opposite answers on the same constitutional question, is what brought the issue to the Supreme Court's door.

The tension between those rulings illustrates a genuine divide. Law enforcement sees geofence warrants as a modern tool for solving serious crimes, and the Chatrie case shows why. Without the warrant, police might never have linked a particular cellphone to a particular robbery. The Court's recent willingness to push back on lower courts that fragment Fourth Amendment analysis suggests the justices are paying close attention to how these doctrines develop.

On the other side, law professors who study digital surveillance warned that upholding geofence warrants could "unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches." The Policing Project at the New York University School of Law argued that the technique allows such searches "with no judicial supervision or constitutional safeguards," though it also acknowledged that geofence warrants can support "legitimate law enforcement activities."

The digital privacy precedent

The Supreme Court has been here before, at least in the neighborhood. In 2018, the Court divided 5-4 in favor of a defendant whose movements had been tracked for nearly four months without a warrant through cellphone tower data. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, cited "seismic shifts in digital technology" and warned about "the exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by wireless carriers today."

That decision marked a departure from the Court's older third-party doctrine, which held that information shared with third parties, a phone company, a bank, cannot be considered private. The geofence warrant question pushes the boundary further. Here, the government is not tracking one suspect's phone over months. It is demanding records on every phone in a defined area during a narrow window.

Whether that distinction makes the practice more or less constitutionally troubling depends on where you stand. For conservatives who value both effective policing and limited government, the case presents a genuine tension. Nobody wants bank robbers walking free. But nobody should be comfortable with the government demanding that a tech company turn over the location records of every citizen who happened to walk past a credit union on a Tuesday afternoon.

The practical reality is that technology companies already hold vast troves of location data on hundreds of millions of Americans. The question is not whether that data exists. It is who gets to access it, under what conditions, and with what constitutional guardrails. The way courts have traditionally handled the boundaries of police authority during investigations does not map neatly onto a world where a single warrant can reach into every pocket in a parking lot.

What the ruling could mean

A ruling that geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional would hand defense lawyers a powerful tool and could jeopardize convictions built on similar evidence across the country. It would also force police departments to find other ways to identify suspects when cameras and witnesses come up short.

A ruling upholding the warrants, on the other hand, would green-light a technique that critics say has no natural limiting principle. If police can demand location data for everyone near a bank, what stops them from doing the same for everyone near a political rally, a house of worship, or a gun show?

The Washington Times noted that the geofence data in Chatrie's case placed him near the bank and led directly to the recovery of cash, including bills still in the teller's signed bands. The evidence was overwhelming. But constitutional rights exist precisely for cases where the evidence is strong, because that is when the temptation to cut corners is greatest.

The Court could also chart a middle path, setting standards for when geofence warrants are permissible, how narrowly they must be drawn, and what judicial oversight is required. That kind of ruling would give police a workable framework while protecting the privacy of bystanders who did nothing wrong. Investigations that rely on surveillance evidence to identify suspects are only going to become more common, and clear rules would serve everyone.

The Associated Press reported that Chatrie's appeal is one of two cases argued Monday, the other involving Bayer's effort to resolve thousands of state lawsuits over its Roundup weedkiller. But the geofence case carries implications far beyond one company or one defendant. It will shape how police use technology to solve crimes, and how much privacy Americans retain in a world where their phones track every step they take.

The Founders who wrote the Fourth Amendment could not have imagined a device in every pocket that records its owner's movements around the clock. But they understood the danger of giving the government open-ended authority to search first and ask questions later. The principle has not changed, even if the technology has. The justices should make sure the law keeps pace with both realities, catching the guilty and leaving the innocent alone.

Okello Chatrie robbed a bank and deserved to be caught. The harder question, the one that matters for every American who carries a phone, is whether the method used to catch him should be available against all of us, all the time, with no one the wiser.