A ‘Monster of Oppression’

Does the Fourth Amendment’s protection of Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures” and general warrants apply in an age of mobile phones? The question will be argued Monday before the Supreme Court. Chatrie v. United States centers on a surveillance tool called geofencing. The technology, unknown to the Framers, but not alien to their ken, enables, say, cell phone users within a specific area to be identified by companies — and police.Chatrie offers a chance for the Nine to vindicate a keystone of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, for the 21st century. The usefulness to police of search warrants based on geofencing data is obvious, as is the concern over potential abuse. The American Civil Liberties Union calls such warrants “dragnets,” implicating individuals for being at a certain place at a certain time, without police showing why “any or all the people” identified “were involved in any crime.”A bank robbery in 2019 at Midlothian, Virginia, gave rise to Chatrie. Police had sought a geofence warrant for an area of some 300 yards around the location of the bank, spanning what lawyers for Okello Chatrie call “three football fields,” a “swath of urban Midlothian” that covered “both the bank and a nearby church.” Sifting through data supplied by Google, police identified Chatrie. He was later convicted of armed robbery.A federal district court denied that Chatrie had ceded his rights by letting Google know his location. The court pointed to a precedent from 2018, Carpenter v. United States. “A user simply cannot forfeit the protections of the Fourth Amendment for years of precise location information by selecting ‘YES, I’M IN’ at midnight,” the court ruled. Yet the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit allowed the geofence evidence to be used in court.In Carpenter, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, held that “an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements” and that giving government access to cell phone location data “contravenes that expectation.” Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy in a dissent reckoned that such data are “no different from the many other kinds of business records the Government has a lawful right to obtain by compulsory process.”Justice Kennedy’s point echoed the precedent from 1979 in Smith v Maryland, a phone records case in which the Nine found that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” This question is likely to reemerge in arguments Monday, and is by no means an easy one. These columns, though, endorse a broad reading on the limits on government power ordained in the Bill of Rights.Feature Justice Joseph Story, who in 1833 noted that the Fourth Amendment’s limits on searches and seizures had been “occasioned by the strong sensibility excited, both in England and America, upon the subject of general warrants almost upon the eve of the American Revolution.” Story described these “general warrants” as allowing “in general terms” police “to apprehend all persons suspected, without naming, or describing any person in special.”“A man’s house is his castle,” is how lawyer James Otis put the ideal animating the Fourth Amendment. In 1761, he argued in court against British officials’ use of general warrants, akin to geofencing avant la lettre, to prosecute Boston merchants. Otis lost the case, but averred in words that could echo before the Nine: “It is the business of this court to demolish this monster of oppression, and to tear into rags this remnant of Starchamber tyranny.”

A ‘Monster of Oppression’

More from the New York Sun

‘Wht Happened Was…’ Supplies a Witty and Mysterious Mediation on Life and Love

Democrats Join Spanish Prime Minister, Progressives at Barcelona for Takedown of Trump

Republicans Set To Kick Off Fraught Budget Process for ICE, Border Patrol

More from the New York Sun

‘Wht Happened Was…’ Supplies a Witty and Mysterious Mediation on Life and Love

Democrats Join Spanish Prime Minister, Progressives at Barcelona for Takedown of Trump

Republicans Set To Kick Off Fraught Budget Process for ICE, Border Patrol

Embattled Starmer, With Ship Attacked in Hormuz Strait, Pretends That Britain Yet Rules the Waves

Hostility to Trump Bars Global Recognition of Israeli-American Military Defeat of Iran

Trump Says ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’ if Iran Doesn’t Accept a Deal To End Conflict

White House Vows Answers After 11 Deaths and Disappearances Linked to Space and Nuclear Research

How the Phenomenal Success of ‘Project Hail Mary’ Can Inspire a Cinematic Revival