Warrants

Controversial Geofence Warrants Face Supreme Court Challenge

Technological innovations allow the authorities to see who has visited whole geographic areas.

J.D. Tuccille | 3.6.2026 7:00 AM

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(Illustration: Midjourney/Yevhenii Tryfonov/Dreamstime)

It sometimes seems technology provides a moving target for the Fourth Amendment, evolving new means of snooping on people while courts struggle to keep up. That's the case with Chatrie v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court will soon determine how much leeway the authorities have to electronically search whole geographic areas to discover who was present. Civil liberties groups like the Institute for Justice and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are scrambling to hold the line on search-and-seizure protections in a world where smartphones create a constant record of most people's locations.

You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.'s commentary on government overreach and threats to everyday liberty.

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Your Smartphone Reveals Where You've Been

In a January 2026 report on the topic, the Congressional Research Service summarized that "geofence warrants are an investigative tool typically employed when law enforcement knows the approximate time and location of a crime but not the identities of suspects. In executing a geofence warrant, law enforcement compels a company to provide certain information indicating which particular smartphones were present within a geographic area during a specified time frame." Geofence warrants may have most controversially been used to identify people who were present at the January 6, 2021 Capitol........

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