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US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
- carterschonwald 4mo agogood. Of course the precise language of the ruling matters, but good.
- puppycodes 4mo agoExcellent, I wonder how this might impact things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467712
- atroon 4mo agoIt will offer this company and those similar to it the ability to increase shareholder value by selling amalgamated information to law enforcement.
- Cider9986 4mo agoGoogle, the company in the case in question, doesn't sell your data. That would be a big change for them to start, they like to keep it for themselves.
- Hnrobert42 4mo agoOf course Alito and Thomas would have allowed the government unlimited power. I am bit surprised to see Barret in the minority of this one.
- DetroitThrow 4mo agoShe's not as big on some of the broader interpretations of the 4th amendment that more civil liberty minded justices would lend credence to.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoParticularly when it comes to tech, she usually goes along party lines but she's been surprisingly independent in other areas. When it comes to the 4th she does heavily prioritize the sanctity of the home and property rights.
- TimorousBestie 4mo agoI have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.
- twoodfin 4mo agoShe doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.
- TimorousBestie 4mo ago[flagged]
- torstenvl 4mo ago[flagged]
- b40d-48b2-979e 4mo ago[flagged]
- ocdtrekkie 4mo agoWhen the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something. Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
- ocdtrekkie 4mo agoAs per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.
- galangalalgol 4mo agoWith the exception of citizens vs united, I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. I don't see how all this turns out well for normal people, but if it does, I think congress will have to be much stronger than it was within the federal government, and the federal government will have to be much weaker than it was. The structural problems are that the federal government doesn't want to be weaker, and congress people don't want to be stronger, because they have no term limits, so they don't want the power to rock the boat.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. They have repeatedly reduced Congressional powers, including today, where they basically said Congress can't setup genuinely independent agencies (in Slaughter). Or when they kneecapped the VRA. Some of them likely subscribe privately to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory.
- mothballed 4mo agoSlaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
- jimbob45 4mo agoWhat if they purchase the information from a company peddling it rather than compelling cell phone companies to hand it over?
- Molitor5901 4mo agoThat is the loop hole IMO and that's how they will get around it.
- twoodfin 4mo agoThis data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently. In reality, Google simply stopped collecting this data in their cloud, leaving it only on the phone. Highly recommend (as always) listening to the oral arguments in your favorite podcast player. The specific question of how Google’s T&C’s mattered here came up more than once.
- WillAdams 4mo agoFor an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was: - identifying all cell phone #s which would regularly appear w/in a certain radius of any State Police Barracks - disambiguating that from people who lived/worked nearby and/or who met certain criteria - determining the income and certain other criteria of the remaining numbers - identifying the home address of the remaining cell #s which met the final criteria and mailing a franchise offer to those cell #s with the assumption that it would be targeting State Police Troopers
- bilbo0s 4mo agoIn fairness, I mean, if the people collecting the data sell it on the open market, then you can't realistically expect it to be private. The only solution in that case is to make it illegal to sell the data. And that's never gonna happen in the US.
- ratelimitsteve 4mo agorare scotus W, but i strongly suspect that because this data is "owned" by someone other than the people that generated it that said owners will simply choose to voluntarily cooperate with government inquiries 100% of the time. You can suppress information if the government unconstitutionally compels google to turn it over, but I don't believe that you as a defendant could push to exclude evidence if it was willingly turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.
- dmfdmf 4mo agoYes, this is the same argument used when the Biden admin during covid pressured the media companies to cancel people and news they did not like for "misinformation" instead of calling it censorship. This and LEOs buying data from Big Corp is just end-running the 1st and 4th amendments which is ultimately fascism.
- DANmode 4mo agoIt’s again legal for the US government to publish propaganda targeted against their citizens, so you’ll struggle to ever know for sure what’s unadulterated US media.
- deathanatos 4mo agoThe Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites. They were taken to court over both, and they prevailed on the former and lost on the latter: the administration (any administration) is permitted to ask a site for a correction, and it is then truly at the site's discretion. They are not permitted to pressure them.
- CobrastanJorji 4mo ago"Permitted" is doing a lot of work there.
- parineum 4mo ago> The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites. Like the definitely known and uncontested factual information on the origin of the virus?
- gausswho 4mo agoPDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
- js2 4mo agoFrom https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enforcements-use-of-geofence-warrant-was-a-search/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo... Additional details: > The information that Google provided to law enforcement officials came in three tranches. First, Google gave law enforcement officials a list of the 19 accounts (but without the names attached to those accounts) linked to devices that were within 150 meters of the bank during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Second, based on that list of 19 accounts, the government asked for additional information about nine accounts that were in the area during a two-hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for, and received, the names and information associated with three accounts – one of which was Chatrie’s. > Relying on the location data, law enforcement officials obtained a warrant to search two residences linked to Chatrie, where they found almost $100,000 of the stolen cash, a gun, and demand notes. > Prosecutors charged Chatrie with bank robbery. He asked the trial judge to bar prosecutors from using the evidence obtained as a result of the geofence warrant at his trial, arguing that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. > A federal district judge agreed that the warrant in Chatrie’s case did not have the kind of probable cause and specificity that the Fourth Amendment requires. However, she nonetheless allowed the prosecutors to use the evidence, reasoning that even if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith. Link to ruling: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
- petcat 4mo agoI guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery. I believe this is similar to how they nabbed the Washington State University murderer. The feds compelled Amazon to give them all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders and were able to correlate it to other devices their suspect's phone had been visible to.
- xyzzy_plugh 4mo agoDo you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe this data is persisted, unless they tore open the device to extract logs.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoBirthright citizenship decision coming tomorrow.
- catapart 4mo agoYep. And this hypocritical bench has had a pattern of ruling sensibly on minor issues like this just before ruling with torturous rationalizations to strip rights from people on larger issues. Feels like there's about to be some pure bullshit spewing from the right flank of this illegitimate court. I'd dearly love to be wrong about this, but I'm not holding out hope. Until alito and thomas are impeached for unconstitutional rulings and bribery, there's nothing worth hoping for.
- Cider9986 4mo agoThere's a 94% chance the EO is struck down on polymarket.
- awkwardpotato 4mo agoAnd what are the odds in Vegas? How is the opinion of a bunch of gamblers on polymarket relevant?
- jbird99 4mo agoBecause Polymarket is full of corrupt folks with insider information. Trump Jr. Is a senior advisor to Polymarket. Iran admitted they would observe Polymarket bets during the height of the war to see when they were next likely to get bombed.
- projektfu 4mo agoPresumably the justices (or their clerks) have told their friends how they're going to rule, and their friends have told their friends, and that's made the market. Or that's supposed to be the value prop of Polymarket. There's precedent. Roberts was so angry that someone leaked the Dobbs decision that he spearheaded the investigation that found that nobody would admit to leaking and there's nothing they can do.
- ARandomerDude 4mo agoIANAL, what are the practical implications of this? I assume the outcome is police would first need probable cause to suspect a specific person of a crime, and then get a warrant for that person's location. Am I wrong?
- cmiles8 4mo agoIt’s raising the bar for doing these searches. Essentially saying some government investigator can’t go “oh well if we had this data we might find something interesting, so let’s get the data.” The court here is saying these geofenced searches smell a lot like such a fishing expedition hoping to find something interesting. Rather you should have evidence that a specific person did a specific thing and need to conduct a search to find additional evidence of said person doing said thing. The 4th amendment protects US persons from the government just doing generalized searches in hopes that it will turn up useful info. You have a right to privacy from the government unless the government can clear a high bar showing probable cause that you’ve done something wrong.
- skybrian 4mo agoGoogle Maps switched from storing location history in the cloud to storing it on your phone for "better privacy," so the geofencing warrant used in this case wouldn't work anymore. However, other apps might record location history in the cloud, so there might be an impact there?
- treis 4mo agoIt's mostly punting on the issue. They determined that it was a "search" under the 4th amendment but made no ruling on whether or not it was "reasonable". It's back to lower courts to decide on that.
- alexpotato 4mo agoI always like to mention how Paula Broadwell was identified as David Petraeus' mistress as it's a good example of how even without a phone you can still be identified. - FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails - They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels - They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels - Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Broadwell#Petraeus_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Broadwell#Petraeus_affai...
- remarkEon 4mo agoThis is also a great example of map resection.
- tantalor 4mo agoIt's also a good demonstration how probable cause is supposed to work. In this case, the subpoena probably looked something like "this email must have been sent by one of your guests, so give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy". Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.
- JoshTriplett 4mo ago> give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy An entire guest list is still a broader fishing expedition than should normally be permitted. Warrants should be much more targeted than that. (Of course, many companies seem happy to give overly broad information without even requiring a warrant...)
- xboxnolifes 4mo agoA guest list on a single day seems pretty fine grained if you looking for someone who was there on that day. Im not sure how they would get much more fine grained than that without already knowing the answer ahead of time.
- microgpt 4mo ago> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. Google removed this feature last year because they were tired of dealing with these warrants. Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
- tencentshill 4mo agoFantastic. One step closer to making holding personal data a liability.
- dylan604 4mo agoHow do you jump to that conclusion? theGoog decided they didn't want to deal with it because it was a hassle not because it was a liability issue. Congress critters would need to get together to make data hoarding a liability and I just don't see that ever happening
- preg_match 4mo agoA hassle is a liability. Not, like, a legal liability but definitely a financial one. The more we make it inconvenient and expensive for companies to hoard this data, the more they will learn it’s not worth it. A lot of the time data is collected “just in case” or for features nobody uses. Companies will learn the hard way that this is a liability to their bottom line and operations, and give it up.
- simoncion 4mo ago> Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation. ...I smell a "backdoor" that's in the shape of the "Locate my device" and similar such systems. Unless there's no Android subsystem that will dredge up and present info about where a phone has been, then this demand seems totally plausible: "We know that you can cause a device to report its historical location information. Cause all of the devices that were within area X between times T and G to report their positions during that time to us, the police. Here's our warrant."
- arlattimore 4mo agoIf it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place, does this mean that products like Flock which indiscriminately violate your privacy would now require a warrant for law enforcement to access (currently they do not)?
- petcat 4mo ago> If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there. What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?
- TheJoeMan 4mo agoIf I run into someone at the grocery store, I can remember "oh I saw them yesterday" if the Police interview me. If I start writing down/logging every time I saw that person at the grocery store and plotting it out, I would consider that "crossing the line". A Flock camera that receives BOLO's for known-criminals and immediately flags captures in real-time is different than tracking every person going everywhere with a history.
- thenewnewguy 4mo agoWhat if the grocery store has a security camera pointed at the door that records 24/7? Should they not be allowed to do that?
- JoshTriplett 4mo agoI think they should be allowed to point it at places inside their store, with prominent disclosure to people entering. I don't think they should be allowed to point it at the public sidewalk.
- dylan604 4mo agoSo what if they mount inside pointing outside?
- einpoklum 4mo ago> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. If he had not opted in to that, only the NSA and intelligence-industrial complex would have had access to his Google location history, while with that option, regular police had enough political clout to demand it. They might lose that ability (although even that is not entirely clear), but the under-the-table mass surveillance of everybody will continue just like before.
- TZubiri 4mo ago"armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty." I will never understand how some people look at this stuff and immediately think that what we need is more EHLO doubly encrypted VPNs with DNS over HTTPS and paid with crypto5.0
- DANmode 4mo agoFinish your point?
- willmadden 4mo agoThey think that because governments have a nasty history of killing tens of millions of their own people and need to be restrained.
- TZubiri 4mo agoDoes the US have such a history?
- magenta4 4mo agoAny warrant must be extremely specific and limit the scope as far as possible. Warrants 99% of the time are rubber stamped and issued for either something non-existent or very flimsy evidence and needs to be stopped in its tracks.
- throw0101d 4mo agoIMHO a more important ruling "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner and overturns major restraint on presidential power": > More broadly, Monday’s decision was a major victory for proponents of the “unitary executive” theory – the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch. Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws – like the one that the court struck down – that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers. * https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fire-ftc-commissioner-and-overturns-major-restraint-on-presidential-power/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fir... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724538 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory AIUI, independent agencies created by Congress are no longer independent.
- zeroonetwothree 4mo agoThis is not the topic of this post, why not submit this separately?
- lowbloodsugar 4mo agoY'all celebrating this like a win, but it's just rubber stamp of dragnets with a few extra steps. Supreme Court could have ruled that geofencing itself was unconstitutional. They did not. Instead: >In this case, she said, Chatrie and the government have disputed – and the court of appeals did not decide – whether the geofence warrant provided the kind of “‘particularized information’ … based on ‘probable cause to believe that Google had information’ that would help solve a crime.” Therefore, the court sent the case back to the lower court for it to make that determination. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enforcements-use-of-geofence-warrant-was-a-search/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...
- deathanatos 4mo agoThey didn't rule on it because it is out of scope of the matter before the court. The lower courts first have to make a ruling that can be appealed. From the ruling: > The conclusion that a Fourth Amendment search occurred does not resolve this case, because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only searches that are “unreasonable.” When law enforcement officials undertake a search to discover evidence of a crime, the reasonableness standard generally requires that they seek a warrant from “a neutral and detached magistrate,” Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 14, who may issue a warrant only when “probable cause is properly established and the scope of the authorized search is set out with particularity,” Kentucky v. King, 563 U. S. 452, 459. The warrant issued here, as described earlier, was an uncommon, multi-step one, and the parties have contested the legality of each stage of the search process it authorized. The Fourth Circuit did not address the questions that unusual warrant raises. Because this is “a court of review, not of first view,” Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U. S. 709, 718, n. 7, the Court leaves it up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause
- lowbloodsugar 4mo agoRight. And there is no chance that the court will side with the liberals when that actually happens.
- Shitty-kitty 4mo ago[dead]
- kgwxd 4mo agoPR stunt. They already have raw access to everything anyway.
- aussieguy1234 4mo agoThere are actual cases of false murder accusations occurring simply because the wrongly accused person simply happened to be within X number of meters of the crime scene. They simply walked past the wrong place at the wrong time with their phone. This is partly why I use GrapheneOS.
- gandreani 4mo agoIt's such a little thing but while reading the opinion I see that the court (Kagan in this case?) makes a factual claim it provides SOURCES. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf "Modern cell phones, we observed a dozen years ago, are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Riley v. California, 573 U. S. 373, 385 (2014). Since then, the percentage of Americans who own smartphones has only increased. To- day, more than nine in ten Americans own a smartphone. See W. Bishop, Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet (Nov. 20, 2025) (91%); compare A. Smith, Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership—2013 Update (June 5, 2013) (56%)."
- tqi 4mo agoTbh it feels quite performative, giving an air of rigor to the what often feels like post hoc reasoning and selective application of precidence and case law...
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoMost SCOTUS opinions are rigorously sourced. They’re usually also well argued. The recent spate being an exception, in particular anything written by Alito.
- niam 4mo agoThey're rigorously sourced in that some set of underpaid clerks is tasked with surfacing their best guess as to what material is most relevant to the court, with optional fact checking competing for their time. https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-not-hard-to-find https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-... So the sources exist, but whether they're quality is another question.
- jacobr1 4mo agoThe surprising bit is that 10% of Americans DO NOT own a smartphone. That must be exceedingly difficult. Increasingly everyday activities require them, without fallbacks. I presume those numbers exclude children, and then if you account for the infirm, it wouldn't surprise me if we started to get to universal levels of ownership.
- tqi 4mo agoThis is an interesting configuration of justices
- tosief 4mo agoWhat is often overloked is how much location data leaks through photo metadata alone. Every photo taken with a phone contains GPS coordinates, timestamps, and device info in the EXIF data. People share photos publicly without realizing they are broadcasting their exact location history. At least with geofence warrants there is a legal process, with photo metadata it is just frely available to anyone who checks.
- echoangle 4mo agoMost (all?) services people use to share their images strip the metadata. You’re not going to find exif data on WhatsApp, instagram, Snapchat etc
- aaronmdjones 4mo agoYou can also revoke Location permissions from your Camera app. I've done this. https://i.postimg.cc/LRd1KbPf/scrot-20260630-085733.png https://i.postimg.cc/LRd1KbPf/scrot-20260630-085733.png
- jmward01 4mo agoSo surveillance tech works. That isn't a question, it is a statement. In a perfect world only bad people would have it applied to them. The issue is that it is too easy now. When wire tapping became a thing it was a physical thing that had time and effort costs. Abuse of it was capped by capability to do it and that bar made it, to me, a reasonable compromise that a judge would need to issue a warrant and that the police would need to expend real, finite, resources to execute it. Without boundaries any surveillance tech is to dangerous to have. Maybe we need quotas? You can only request and monitor x# of people a month where x is a small number related to population size. We need to find ways to limit overreach of technology capabilities. I am glad this was decided this way but I really want a more concrete tool that limits all technologies like this.
- devilfileprong 4mo ago[flagged]
- ascotan 4mo agoThe implications are far reaching beyond cell phones. any service that stores location data for it's user is subject to 4th amendment expectations _regardless_ of an opt-in. The court specifically rejected the argument that by opting-in the user is abrogating their privacy rights. If you centrally store location data you have an obligation to protect that data under the 4th amendment as private and would require a warrant. The impacts here are with food delivery apps, fitness apps, weather apps, cloud services, ad tech agencies, data resellers/brokers, etc.
- alphawhisky 4mo agoDon't forget that beyond exposing your right to privacy from the government, this info is basically a sitting duck for bad actors outside of government, too. I wonder if these companies would be held accountable if the privacy stealing was from the other end. Probably not.
- alex_young 4mo agoThe 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.
- pc86 4mo agoIt's commonly forgotten that the bill of rights simply restricts the government. For nearly 100 years it didn't even apply to state governments but just the federal government.
- saghm 4mo agoMore context for those not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
- yieldcrv 4mo agoIn case you were wondering This ruling was unusually bipartisan because some justices didn’t like that they were hearing a case at all that shouldn’t affect the case at all.
- LatteLazy 4mo agoObviously there should be limits but what should they be? I actually don’t think asking for phone ids for 30min before and after an event within a limited distance IS overly broad. The fact it only returned 19 initial IDs kind of shows that no? Equally, knowing someone has been in or near a bank is not particularly intrusive. It’s not like searching who visited a lawyers office or a sexual health clinic etc. So would a 5 min window have been ok? Or a 10minute window? When does a warrant become “sprawling”?
- gwbas1c 4mo ago> Obviously there should be limits but what should they be? A warrant made by a neutral court; that is specifically narrow enough to only target people who could be reasonable suspects. I'm having trouble understanding what the court did rule on, because IMO this is a totally reasonable use of data. It was very limited in scope, both in time and location.
- superxpro12 4mo agoGreat... now do flock cameras, license plate trackers, basically everything in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369980