Reason’s Damon Root (who used to interview LPNY candidates at Columbia University back in the day) on the Supreme Court case that evaluates the privacy violations implicated by the use of “geo-fencing” (police getting mass digital location info of cell phone users):
…At issue in Chatrie v. United States is a law enforcement tool known as a “geofence warrant.” In this case, the police told Google to search the location histories of every one of its users in order to determine which users were present in the vicinity of a bank robbery.
Adam Unikowsky, the lawyer for Okello Chatrie, whose conviction stemmed from that geofence warrant, told the justices that the government’s tactics should be viewed as an illegal “general warrant,” the sort of all-compassing search that the Fourth Amendment was originally written to prevent. “There was not probable cause to search the virtual private papers of every single person within the geofence merely because of their proximity to the crime,” he argued.
By contrast, Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin told the justices that Chatrie’s position, if adopted, would result in an “unprecedented transformation of the Fourth Amendment into an impregnable fortress around records of his public movements that he affirmatively consented to allow Google to create, maintain, and use.” Read More