Supreme Court considers lawfulness of broad police requests for cellphone location data
Supreme Court considers lawfulness of broad police requests for cellphone location data
Supreme Court considers lawfulness of broad police requests for cellphone location data
The justices considered whether law enforcement violated a convicted armed robber's constitutional rights by identifying him via a broad search of cellphone users at the scene.
The Chatrie case involves a broader, open-ended search, which privacy advocates refer to as a dragnet that pulls in information from sometimes hundreds of innocent people. A geofence warrant was infamously used to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who broke into the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021.
If the court were to find that geofence searches do not require a warrant, it would open the door to government abuse that could infringe upon free speech rights by, for example, targeting protesters, privacy rights advocates say.