Wernick & Associates, Ltd.
MONTH-IN-BRIEF (Jun 2026)
Cell Phone Location Data/History Warrant Request: Is It a Fourth Amendment Search?
By Alan S. Wernick, Esq., Wernick & Associates, LTD.
Cell phone location data and location history are usually turned on by most cell phone users. In a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Court considered how the Fourth Amendment applies to a geofence warrant requesting cell site location information (“CSLI,” i.e., cell phone location data and location history).
In Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112, 2026 U.S. LEXIS 2878 (U.S. June 29, 2026)), local police in Virginia were trying to solve a crime involving a man robbing a credit union. As described in the syllabus, the police “learned from witness interviews and surveillance footage that the robber had approached the credit union from a corner of an adjacent church while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but they could not find out anything more, and the robber remained at large.” Id. at *1. The police applied to the local court for a geofence warrant directed to Google requesting CSLI within a certain radius of the credit union (the geofence) that Google collects through its Location History service. Based on a three-step process narrowing down anonymized data for all cell phones within the geofence in a time period to a final list for which Google turned over identifying information, the federal government charged Okello Chatrie, one of the individuals identified through that process and the petitioner in the case, with committing the crime.
