ACLU (AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION) REACTION: "The Supreme Court held today that a dragnet search using Google’s location history data is covered by the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizures. The decision forcefully rejected the government’s argument that law enforcement can request our location data in the form of a “geofence” search free of any Fourth Amendment limitation. The geofence search at issue in the case is an invasive surveillance technique that enables police to search for and locate unknown numbers of people in a large geographical area by exploiting cell phone location data held by Google. “The Court’s decision provides critical protection against invasive and overbroad government searches of our personal information,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with ACLU’s Center for Democracy. “Although Google already changed its system so it no longer has access to the same data the government had been seeking through geofence warrants, similar kinds of reverse searches of sensitive data held by other companies will continue to be a threat to privacy. Law enforcement and courts are on notice that new technology does not open up surveillance loopholes, and strict adherence to the Fourth Amendment’s protections is required.”
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: Justice Kagan said the Google “database is new, but the principle covering it is not: That principle is instead the one our history has given. The Fourth Amendment must, as ever, protect against unjustified governmental intrusion on the privacy of the individual.”
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STORY: 'High Court Majority: 'Geofence'searching without warrant violates fourth amendment,' by Criminal Justice Journalists, on June 29, 2026. "Ted Gest is president of Criminal Justice Journalists. He publishes a daily news digest on that site. Gest started covering crime and justice for his hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and continued at U.S. News & World Report, where he also covered the White House, the Supreme Court and law schools. He is the author of “Crime & Politics” and the co-editor of the forthcoming “Inside the Upheaval of Journalism: Reporters Look Back on 50 Years of Covering the News.” He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism."
GIST: "The Supreme Court on Monday restricted the use of a relatively new law enforcement technique that allows police to tap into giant tech-firm databases to see who was near the scene of a crime.
Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Elena Kagan said that the technique, known as geofencing, violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches, NPR reports.
Geofencing entails drawing a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. The government can seek a warrant to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its users who were within the geofence at the time of the crime.
The case stems from a robbery in the suburbs of Richmond, Va. A man stole $195,000 from a bank, but after two months, the case went cold until detectives served a warrant on Google, asking for the location information of cellphone users in and around the bank for the hour before and after the crime was committed.
Complying with the warrant, Google initially found the names of 19 people who were in or near the bank, but Google pushed back, ultimately providing the police with the names of just three people whose location data showed they were at the bank.
When police went to the home of one of them, they found a pistol matching one seen on security camera footage of the robbery and nearly $100,000 in cash. That man, Okello Chatrie, later confessed and was convicted of the crime.
His attorneys argued that geofence searches violate the Fourth Amendment because they allow the government “to search first and develop suspicions later.” The geofence warrants in this case directed Google to search millions of users’ location histories, meaning that millions of people were subjected to a search despite never having done anything suspicious.
The government argued that because people can choose not to give companies like Google their location data, that data is not constitutionally protected.
Justice Kagan said the Google “database is new, but the principle covering it is not: That principle is instead the one our history has given. The Fourth Amendment must, as ever, protect against unjustified governmental intrusion on the privacy of the individual.”
In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito said, “Today’s decision makes clear that the last two centuries of Fourth Amendment search doctrine simply do not apply to digital-age methods of tracking a suspect’s location.”
The Supreme Court is expected to issue its last opinions of the term on Tuesday.""
The entire story can be read at:
https://crimjj.wordpress.com/2026/06/29/supreme-court-majority-says-geofence-searching-violates-fourth-amendment/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
