Supreme Court to hear case on phone location warrants used to catch bank robber

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Independent

Saturday 25 April 2026 11:56 EDT


The Supreme Court is poised to rule on a critical digital privacy issue: whether geofence warrants, a powerful police tool, violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.

This legal challenge stems from cases like Okello Chatrie's, who stole $195,000 from a bank in suburban Richmond, Virginia. He eluded police until a geofence warrant compelled Google to provide location histories of devices within a virtual perimeter near the crime scene, identifying his phone among a handful of others.

The high court's decision will be the latest attempt to apply a 1791 constitutional provision to technologies unimaginable to its founders. Chatrie's appeal is one of two cases being argued Monday. The other is an effort by Bayer to have the court block thousands of state lawsuits alleging the global agrochemical manufacturer failed to warn people that its popular Roundup weedkiller could cause cancer.

Geofence warrants turn the usual way of pursuing suspects on its head. Typically, police identify a suspect and then obtain a warrant to search a home or a phone. With geofence warrants, police do not have a suspect, only a location where a crime took place. They work in reverse to identify people who were in the area.

Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/supreme-court-geofence-warrants-okello-chatrie-b2964912.html

[cstanleytech]

1. Honestly it's not much different than the police obtaining security camera recording from surrounding businesses.

They use that to determine who was where and doing what and when in order to track down the suspects.
The information should however regarding everyone else should be required to be deleted in a reasonable amount of time as the police should not be allowed to keep everything.

[reACTIONary]

2. Exactly! Very good analogy!

[JMCKUSICK]

3. And if they used it to identify all of us at a particular protest?

[reACTIONary]

5. In the case of geofencing I think a warrant is required....

....to the tellcom operator, not with regard to a specific individual.

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't geofencing used to prosecute the Jan 6 insurrectionists? Maybe not the "protest" you were thinking about.

And, of course, they can already ID you with video of the protest....and they can scrape the video off of you tube, no warrant required.

If you are going to be out in public you really should have no expectation of privacy. Especially if you are continuously broadcasting your exact location to a third party which is subject to warrants. If you are that worried about it, leave your cell phone at home. And wear a mask.

[JMCKUSICK]

4. There's one very profound difference,

Security cameras are known and public, my cell phone should not be.

Would you have been ok with a random search of neighborhood landlines thirty years ago so police could see through your use whether people were home or not on a particular night to see if one might be a suspect because of it?

I think we've sleepwalked out privacy rights away too much already. If anything, I think the phone makers need to create them so that location is automatically shut off and must be manually activated versus the opposite setup now.

[reACTIONary]

6. A land line....

.... doesn't tell anyone if you are home or not, and if you aren't, where you happen to be. So I don't think there is much utility in seeking that information. But if a suspect claimed to have made a call from home, I could see getting a warrant for the pen register to check out its veracity.

I don't think anyone who carries an electronic device that is continuously broadcasting location information to a third part should have any reasonable expectation of privacy. Ditch the cell phone and get a land line.

[BumRushDaShow]

11. "A land line........ doesn't tell anyone if you are home or not"

The so-called "call tracing" for things like "bomb threats", most definitely was to determine if the call was from that home and the old-school "wire tap" could determine a voice ID for whoever was at that "home". Specifically talking about copper/POTS lines (traced through switches) vs internet-derived calls that can mask call origin (but there are tools that can strip masking packets).

[cstanleytech]

7. think of it like this.

When a crime happens the police during their investigation question witnesses and they review all the security photos possible but at no time are they publishing the contents of your wallet. In this case they are just using the available data from the cell towers much like they would security cameras but they aren't going to be sharing your cell phone number with the public so your privacy is still preserved.

[reACTIONary]

9. Agreed.

[3825-87867]

8. Next item for police...like ice..

a crime was committed. No one could offer a description of the perp so let's get google to provide a list of ALL then maybe hunndreds of people who might have been in the neighborhood at the time. Also, get Apple's list of people in the surrounding, I don't know, 10 square miles and see if any of those COULD be a criminal. We don't even need police, you could get Elon's Kids (maybe they need a telethon, too) and they could peruse thousands of people anywhere they could imagine people could have been and then provide as much definitive evidence as the fraud they didn't find in the gov. And the cops or whomever will absolutely not look at anyone's private data, at least they won't tell, right?
Sure beats the hell out of looking through an old style phone book. Too much work for these men. This is easier and I'm sure fool proof. And if a hundred Americans are suspected, incovenienced and radicalized and their families, well, it's better that many suffer so that they get the ONE who done it.

[reACTIONary]

10. The case at hand is limited to information about pings to a cell tower....

.... what in land-line terms is known as a pen register. Pen registers have always been available to law enforcement, given a warrant. Obtaining the geofenced pen-registers also requires a warrant... note the the original post references "phone location warrants." Warrants are the mechanism referenced in the fourth amendment to ensure that a search is reasonable and limited to a legitimate purpose - a criminal investigation.

As far as "private data" is concerned, what private data are you referring to? Location data from a cell phone ping is not comparable to your medical records or your bank account, or any other personal data that might be located on your phone. It is fairly limited information that you voluntarily provide to a third party (the telcom company) and therefore it is already considered public, not private, data.

I don't see why we should be making the job (catching criminals) of "these men" any harder than it can be. Law enforcement is a necessary and legitimate government function for the good of us all.

[2naSalit]

12. Even if...

SCROTUS rules against it, they'll use it anyway.

It's not like the members of this admin have any respect for laws or anything that might protect us from them. They already abuse their powers so we really can't expect them to do it in this case.

[reACTIONary]

14. If SCOTUS rules against it...

.... Judges will deny warrants and the telcom companies won't provide it without a warrant. Even if the telcom companies do provide it, it won't be admissible in court.

The judicial branch enforces their decisions by hampering or preventing prosecutions and investigations. Prosecutors pay attention to that because the end up losing in court.

[OldBaldy1701E]

13. Okay, let's hold on the rest of this story and ask one very important question.

What complete idiot brings his cell phone to commit a crime?

Didn't enough people get arrested, back in the day, because of their stupid videotaped evidence?

Did no one learn anything?

(Don't answer that. Current events have already answered that.)

[reACTIONary]

15. One thing we have going for us is that...

.... criminals don't tend to be the sharpest tools in the tool box.

[Bengus81]

16. How did he get $195,000 out of a teller station? I thought they only had 2K or so ready

[OldBaldy1701E]

17. So, this happened a few decades ago.

I have this friend that was working with a major bank in North Carolina as a programmer. He was part of the team that was working on the teller machine programs to make them better. (At the time, ATMs were a fairly new thing.) So, he tells me about this one time that they were going in to the main downtown branch of the bank on a Friday afternoon. They watched as the bank prepared for the weekend by opening a cabinet that was below the teller machine on the front lobby and putting in boxes of money. They did this because they knew that someone usually had to come in and restock the machine before the weekend was over. They did it this way, my friend found out, because otherwise they would have to go through the whole process of entering the bank to get the funds needed to restock, so they started doing it this way. The problem was that this 'cabinet' below the teller machine was a simple one with a simple small lock on it. One could almost get their fingers into the crack and literally yank the door open. My friend said he looked over to the other person as they watched this going on.

The other person, who was obviously aware of this practice, replied, "Yeah. All it would take is a screwdriver and about sixty seconds."

So, there are ways to have that happen without being relegated to just the amount in the machine.