Supreme Court grapples with whether police may seek sweeping cellphone location data in investigations

 

The sun rises above a facade of the US Supreme Court building on March 31. 

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When an investigation into a Virginia bank robbery went cold a few years back, local police turned to Google.

Authorities served the tech giant with a “geofence warrant,” which required the company to parse location data on millions of people to find a handful whose cellphones pegged them within 300 meters of the bank at the time of the robbery.

With the data in hand, police solved their case. They also triggered a constitutional challenge that is now before the Supreme Court.

The justices grappled Monday with whether the sweeping warrants, which are directed at tech companies rather than individual suspects, are consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches. Several justices asked sharp arguments of both sides and appeared to be looking for a narrow outcome.

“What’s to prevent the government from using this to find out the identities of everybody at a particular church, a particular political organization,” asked Chief Justice John Roberts, who pressed both sides with tough questions. “What are the restraints that are going to prevent that from becoming a problem?”

After two hours of argument, the court seemed unlikely to accept the broad position that the geofence warrants were unconstitutional, though it might look for ways to limit their use.

The case seemed likely to split the court’s six-justice conservative majority.