The decision of the United States Supreme Court on January 16, 2026, to hear Chatrie v. United States places a critical constitutional question at the center of modern criminal procedure:

whether the government may lawfully collect location data of every individual within a defined geographic area without individualized suspicion. At stake is the continued vitality of the Fourth Amendment in an era of digital surveillance.

At the core of the dispute is the legality of so-called “geofence warrants.” These warrants compel technology companies, most commonly Google, to disclose anonymized location data for all devices present within a specific geographic boundary during a particular time window. Law enforcement then narrows the data set to identify suspects. In Chatrie’s case, police obtained data for every mobile device within approximately 150 meters of a bank robbery scene in 2019, eventually identifying Okello Chatrie, who was later convicted.

The first legal proposition is whether the use of a geofence warrant constitutes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. Supreme Court jurisprudence makes clear that a search occurs when government action infringes upon a reasonable expectation of privacy. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court held that accessing historical cell-site location information constitutes a search, recognizing that location data provides an intimate window into a person’s life. Applying this reasoning, geofence warrants, by capturing location data of numerous individuals regardless of suspicion, clearly intrude upon expectations of privacy and therefore qualify as searches within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

The second proposition concerns whether geofence warrants satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of particularity. The Constitution expressly forbids “general warrants,” which authorize broad, indiscriminate searches untethered to specific suspects or evidence. The Fifth Circuit has correctly characterized geofence warrants as modern general warrants because they reverse the traditional investigative process: instead of identifying a suspect and then searching for evidence, the government searches everyone in the area to identify a suspect. This indiscriminate sweep is fundamentally incompatible with constitutional safeguards designed to protect innocent persons from state intrusion.

A related issue is probable cause. The Fourth Amendment requires that warrants be supported by probable cause, specifically linking the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized to criminal activity. In geofence warrants, probable cause is not individualized; it is geographic. Presence in a location becomes the basis for surveillance, effectively converting proximity into suspicion. This logic dilutes the probable cause standard and risks normalizing dragnet surveillance in everyday law enforcement.

The Fourth Circuit upheld Chatrie’s conviction by invoking the “good-faith exception,” reasoning that police relied on the warrant in objective good faith. However, this reasoning addresses the admissibility of evidence, not the constitutionality of the practice itself. The good-faith exception cannot cure a warrant that is structurally incompatible with Fourth Amendment principles. If the Supreme Court were to rely on good faith to uphold geofence warrants, it would risk allowing unconstitutional surveillance to persist so long as it is novel or technologically complex.

Ultimately, the decisive legal question is whether constitutional protections evolve to constrain new surveillance technologies or whether technology is allowed to erode constitutional limits by degrees. If geofence warrants are upheld, the Fourth Amendment’s protections against general searches will be substantially weakened, not only in the United States but as a persuasive precedent globally.

The Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision will therefore do more than resolve a single criminal case. It will determine whether constitutional privacy remains rooted in individual rights or yields to efficiency-driven policing models that treat entire populations as potential suspects. In a digital age where location data is ubiquitous, the answer will define the boundary between lawful investigation and unconstitutional mass surveillance.