Bringing a smartphone to a bank robbery? 4th Amendment issue hits Supreme Court
Bringing a smartphone to a bank robbery? 4th Amendment issue hits Supreme Court
Bart Jansen, USA TODAYSun, April 26, 2026 at 7:00 AM UTC
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WASHINGTON – Carrying a smartphone to a bank robbery wasn’t such a smart move for Okello Chatrie.
Now the Supreme Court must decide whether the "groundbreaking" and "previously unimaginable" way police tracked down Chatrie through his Samsung Galaxy S9 phone violated his Fourth Amendment protection from an unlawful search.
At stake in the case is whether the government can sift through voluminous data that exposes a phone's location at a crime scene – without knowing who is holding it. Such a search through Google’s location data begins with a haystack of hundreds of millions of phones and enables the police to filter out a few that could lead to a suspect.
The tactic – what is called a “reverse search” without an identified suspect – is tantalizing for police who reach a dead-end in a shoe-leather investigation. But civil libertarians are unnerved about casting such a wide dragnet that captures highly personal information from hundreds or perhaps thousands of people who aren’t criminals.
If the court upholds such digital searches without an identified suspect, legal experts say the strategy could expand to pry through search engines, cloud storage and artificial-intelligence chats.
“It definitely has the capacity to be an extremely important landmark decision, depending on how they write it and decide it,” William McGeveran, dean of the University of Minnesota law school, told USA TODAY.
A picture of the robbery of Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, on May 20, 2019, from the U.S. District Court file in the case against Okello Chatrie. Chatrie pleaded guilty to robbing the bank, but is appealing the conviction because of how police tracked him down based on the location of his smartphone.Police track down bank robber through his smartphone location
Chatrie pleaded guilty to robbing Call Federal Credit Union at gunpoint on May 20, 2019, and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
Video showed Chatrie walking into the bank in Midlothian, Virginia, at 4:52 p.m. while talking on a cell phone. Police suspected he was conferring with an accomplice. Chatrie handed a teller a note demanding money, brandished a silver-and-black pistol and left with $195,000.
Police interviewed witnesses but ran out of leads after about a month. But because of seeing the phone on the surveillance video, police got a warrant to search Google's location data for all phones within about one-and-a-half football fields of the bank during the half-hour on either side of the robbery.
Authorities call such a search a "geofence" because it designates boundaries to search within. The data is fairly precise, measured to within 3 meters every 2 minutes based on the Global Positioning System, Bluetooth beacons, cell phone towers and local wi-fi networks.
The data is also voluminous. Google had location tracking for more than 500 million users at the time. The search found 19 phones near the bank at the right time, whose owners remained anonymous at that point. Police asked Google for the names of three phone owners, one of whom was Chatrie.
After identifying Chatrie, police found he had recently bought a pistol that looked like the one used in the robbery. Police conducted other searches and found nearly $100,000 in cash and a silver-and-black 9 mm pistol in places where he lived.
A picture of the map of the area around Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, that police wanted to search for the location of cell phones of suspects, after a robbery on May 20, 2019. A judge approved a warrant for the search of Google location data for a half-hour before and after the robbery.'Potential for abuse is breathtaking': Chatrie
Chatrie pleaded guilty under the condition that he could continue to appeal court decisions that approved the search.
Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the federal government, argued that Chatrie gave up any expectations of privacy when he shared his location with Google.
“An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see, that he has opted to allow a third party to analyze for its own purposes, and that are sufficiently short-term that they reveal little, if anything about the patterns of life – particularly when his identity remains anonymous,” Sauer wrote in one filing.
He said there was "no sound reason" to overturn the conviction that "rests on the objective good faith of the investigators' efforts here."
But Chatrie contends this kind of broad search without a specific subject in mind is precisely what the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.
“The technology might be novel, but the constitutional problem it presents is not,” Chatrie’s lawyers said in one filing. “The potential for abuse is breathtaking: the government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally, or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there.”
A picture of the robbery of Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, on May 20, 2019, from the U.S. District Court file in the case against Okello Chatrie. Chatrie pleaded guilty to robbing the bank, but is appealing the conviction because of how police tracked him down based on the location of his smartphone.Courts grapple with 'previously unimaginable' and 'groundbreaking' investigative tool
Courts have offered mixed views about the investigative approach.
U.S. District Judge Hannah Lauck in Virginia ruled the search violated the Fourth Amendment but that police acted in good faith so the results could be used in court. She warned she wouldn't "simply rubber stamp geofence warrants in the future."
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“This case implicates the next phase in the courts’ ongoing efforts to apply the tenets underlying the Fourth Amendment to previously unimaginable investigatory methods,” Lauck wrote.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 7-7 on the case, leaving Lauck's decision in place. The court ruled the warrant wasn't really a search because Chatrie "voluntarily exposed this information to Google." Chief Judge Albert Diaz said he sided with the lower court solely because of the good faith of the police.
“My colleagues have widely divergent views on the intersection of the Fourth Amendment and the groundbreaking investigative tool at issue here,” Diaz wrote. “But judicial modesty sometimes counsels that we not make grand constitutional pronouncements merely because we can. This is such a case.”
State courts and lower federal courts have wrestled with geofence cases for years but this appears to be the first case to reach the Supreme Court on the subject. The high court's last major Fourth Amendment case eight years ago dealt with the privacy of location data, but that was after a suspect was identified rather than while still searching for a suspect.
“I would call it the first time the Supreme Court has dealt with geofence warrants,” McGeveran said.
Yurina Noguchi, 32, chats with Klaus, her AI partner on ChatGPT, during a train ride from Tokyo to Okayama for their ceremonial wedding, October 26, 2025.Google resists demands for info about vast swaths of San Francisco, Albuquerque
Google, which now leaves location data on individual phones, said it objected to more than 3,000 warrants and many were later withdrawn. Some of the requests would have swept in hundreds or thousands of innocent people, the company said.
One contested warrant sought phone locations in a 2.5-square-mile part of San Francisco for two-and-a-half days covering thousands of people.
In another case, the warrant sought location data from 489 acres in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The search would have captured 3,000 users, including more than 1,000 attending a funeral service at the Islamic Center of New Mexico.
In a third case, the warrant sought location data for 25 square miles over Vail and Aspen, Colorado. The search would have covered hundreds of homes, nearly 80 hotels, numerous places of worship and at least two hospitals.
"Individuals’ documents and data stored electronically and securely in remote servers are the modern-day 'papers and effects' protected by the Fourth Amendment," the company said in a filing. "Though kept on servers in 'the cloud,' these documents are not publicly accessible. They include things like emails, documents, photographs, and search history stored privately by technology companies like Google."
Muslims arrive for Friday prayer services at the Islamic Center of New Mexico during Friday prayer services on August 12, 2022.Phones track personal data such as visits to psychiatrists or abortion clinics
Critics of the data searches, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said they would lead to serious invasions of privacy of millions of people in the wrong place at the wrong time, with no connection to crimes.
Chatrie said the searches could reveal when people visit “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on.”
The ACLU said approving such searches would leverage new and powerful technology to invade privacy.
“The warrants purporting to authorize these dragnet searches are general warrants, which the Fourth Amendment forbids,” the ACLU said in one filing.
A Google Cloud logo is pictured at a trade fair in Hannover Messe, in Hanover, Germany, on April 22, 2024.Searches of cloud storage, AI chats could come next: law professors
Eight law professors filed an argument in the case that described how searches of highly personal data could go far beyond phones.
Police, for example, could track down suspects based on what was typed in a search engine. But they would do so without knowing whether a request for information about “Savannah Guthrie” or “Charlie Kirk” was made for malicious reasons for just curiosity about a public figure.
Chats with artificial intelligence could offer another cluster of information from 700 million people who use the programs weekly.
Another option would be to search cloud storage for billions of photographs with time and location stamps, email messages and calendar items. A 2020 user survey concluded that a significant portion of U.S. users store sensitive information in the cloud, including 35% of office documents, 27% of passwords and log-in data and 17% of financial information.
“All this use generates an ocean of data in the form of saved conversations, an irresistible one through which to drag law enforcement nets,” the lawyers wrote. “As the Court considers the geofence warrant in this case specifically, it should be mindful of the ripple effects its opinion may have.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Smartphone data at center of Supreme Court fight over police searches
Source: “AOL Breaking”
