By Cliff Montgomery – Jul. 18th, 2026
Chatrie v. United States was decided on July 30th. The corporate media did not talk about it much, but the decision provided a clear recognition that electronic data is constitutionally protected private information. This truth stopped cold a law enforcement action defended by the Trump Administration, that collected the information of private citizens held by a major U.S.-based business.
The decision may also have a strong effect on the data collection industry, in which private companies some times sold to the highest bidder scores of information they had collected on you. Many times, that bidder was the U.S. government.
Chatrie v. United States may make such an activity a thing of the past.
Below, the American Spark is quoting the first part of the Supreme Court decision. It explains why the electronic data of U.S. citizens and others in the country are forms of information protected by the 4th Amendment, which “protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy.”
Monday, the Spark will print the latter section that explains why Trump’s argument for the collection simply makes no legal sense.
But the decision was not unanimous. Judges Alito, Thomas and Barrett argued against the decision.
“On May 20, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Local police officers 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.
“On June 14, the police officers applied to a Virginia magistrate for a geofence warrant directed to Google, which would require Google to hand over data about the cell phones located within a 150-meter radius of the credit union—the so-called ‘geofence’—near the time of the crime.
“The application described the cell-phone location data Google collects through a service called Location History, which records the location of a user’s cell phone every two minutes or so. The application also explained how that cell-phone location data could help identify the robber, possible accomplices, or additional witnesses.
“The warrant described a three-step process that the police would follow: at step one, Google would produce anonymized location data for all cell phones within the geofence 30 minutes before to 30 minutes after the robbery; at step two, officers would attempt to narrow the list, and Google would provide additional anonymized data for that narrowed list, consisting of cell-phone locations both inside and outside the geofence during a two-hour period surrounding the robbery; and at step three, officers would further narrow the list, and Google would turn over identifying information, including names and phone numbers, for users on the final list.
“The magistrate issued the warrant, and through this process, Google ultimately produced three cell-phone users’ identifying information, including petitioner Okello Chatrie, whose location data showed that he entered the geofence about ten minutes before the robbery and headed toward a residential area immediately after leaving the bank.
“Following further police work, a federal grand jury charged Chatrie with robbery and related firearms offenses, and he moved to suppress the information the police obtained from Google. According to Chatrie, the officers had acquired that data through a Fourth Amendment search, and the warrant ostensibly authorizing that search was invalid. The District Court found that the geofence warrant ‘plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment’ but denied the motion based on the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule.
“A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit affirmed on different reasoning, holding that no search occurred because Chatrie ‘did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours’ worth of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google.’
“The Fourth Circuit granted rehearing en banc and affirmed in a one-sentence per curiam, with the court dividing evenly on whether a Fourth Amendment search had occurred. This Court granted certiorari solely on the question whether the police violated the Fourth Amendment in obtaining Chatrie’s location data.” […]
“The Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy, and governmental ‘intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search.’ Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 304. The Amendment’s ‘basic purpose’ is ‘to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by governmental officials,’ id., at 303, and it was designed ‘to place obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance.”
“(1) In Carpenter, this Court held that accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) constitutes a Fourth Amendment search because ‘individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.’
The Court reasoned that CSLI provides a ‘detailed’ and ‘encyclopedic’ portrait of a person’s whereabouts … and, with that, ‘an intimate window into a person’s life.’
Because people ‘compulsively carry’ their cell phones ‘all the time,’ the Court explained, a cell phone ‘tracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner,’ and thus ‘faithfully follows’ him not only through ‘public thoroughfares [but] into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales.’
“The Court further observed that the ‘newfound tracking capacity’ that CSLI gives the police ‘runs against everyone’—not just those ‘under investigation’—and ‘travel[s] back in time,’ making possible a form of surveillance that would have been unknown prior to the digital age. Carpenter accordingly held that ‘[a]llowing government access to cell-site records contravenes’ expectations of privacy.
“(2) Everything Carpenter relied on to find that law enforcement officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they accessed CSLI records applies as well or better to the police’s accessing of Location History data.
“First, Location History provides an even more fine-tuned picture of a person’s movements, pinpointing location within around twenty meters rather than within sectors of one-eighth to four
square miles; it records location every two minutes or so for a daily average of 720 chartings rather than 101; and it can estimate elevation to reveal which floor of a building a phone is on.
“Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct ‘retrospective[ly],’ and with no real effort, people’s comings and goings in any area, enabling ‘tireless and absolute surveillance’ of any number of people in any number of places.
“And third, Location History implicates personal privacy interests even more than CSLI, because Location History is more the cell-phone user’s own. Most cell-phone users have no awareness of CSLI records, and would never try to retrieve them; by contrast, Google users regularly employ Location History as a personal journal. In that way, Location History resembles other private materials—e.g., emails, documents, photographs, or calendars—that even if stored on Google’s servers, a user reasonably views as his own and expects to be shielded from the ‘inquisitive eyes’ of the government.”
