In questioning an attorney for the petitioner, Adam Unikowsky, a number of conservative justices \u2014 including Chief Justice John Roberts \u2014 asked why the government shouldn\u2019t be allowed to access location data taken from a third party given that Chatrie had \u201copted-in\u201d to share that data.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just don\u2019t agree that one should have to flip off one\u2019s location history as well as other cloud services to avoid government surveillance,\u201d Unikowsky answered, raising whether the government was entitled to getting emails or calendar data that are also stored in the cloud. (Google has since moved location data to users\u2019 individual devices.)<\/p>\n
Some liberal justices, too, had skeptical questions for Unikowsky. \u201cThis identifies a place, a crime \u2014 a limited time frame, but a time frame,\u201d Sonia Sotomayor said, referring to protections from open-ended searches under the Fourth Amendment. \u201cSo it\u2019s not a general warrant in this historical sense.\u201d But she also said that because location data follows users everywhere: \u201cWhen the police are searching or asking for a search result, there\u2019s no way to predict whether they\u2019re going to invade your privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The line of questioning about how far a government request for bulk data can go continued from both conservative and liberal justices when it was the government\u2019s turn to argue its position. Justices probed skeptically about what made emails or calendar data different, and whether the government could do a physical search of all of the lockers in a storage facility to find one gun they believed might be there.<\/p>\n
It was an unusually long session<\/a> for the Supreme Court, going two hours. A ruling could come in June or July<\/a>. Predicting how a court will decide based on justices\u2019 questions is famously fraught. Only one justice, Samuel Alito, hinted strongly at how he was likely to decide.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m struggling to understand why we are here in this case, other than the fact that at least four of us voted to take it,\u201d he said. He said he didn\u2019t believe anything new of note could come out of the court based on lower court rulings during questioning of Unikowsky. \u201cWe are all free to write law review articles on this fascinating subject, but that seems like that\u2019s what you\u2019re asking for.\u201d<\/p>\n Orin Kerr, a Stanford University law professor who filed a friend of the court brief on the government\u2019s side, said he believed based on the oral arguments that the court will say geofence warrants can be drafted lawfully.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Justices seem likely to reject the broader argument Chatrie made about the lawfulness of the warrant,\u201d he wrote on social media<\/a>. \u201cThey\u2019ll probably say the geofence warrants have to be limited in time and space.\u201d<\/p>\n Casey Waughn, a privacy lawyer and senior associate at Armstrong Teasdale, was struck by the absence of a major focus on \u201cthird-party doctrine,\u201d under which there\u2019s no reasonable expectation of privacy when citizens give their information to an outside party like a bank.\u00a0<\/p>\n She also honed in on arguments Unikowsky made.<\/p>\n \u201cHis argument really gave two lines to go down for the judges, and one was that you have a property interest in your data on the cloud, and the other was that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy for your data on the cloud,\u201d she told CyberScoop. \u201cAnd historically, both of those avenues have been grounds on which the Court has found that \u2026issue is protected under the Fourth Amendment, and therefore that the actions constituted a search. So I thought it was interesting that he went and kind of argued both of those lanes.\u201d<\/p>\n Alan Butler, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center that filed a friend of the court brief on the side of the petitioner, said the stakes in the case are high.<\/p>\n \u201cToday\u2019s arguments underscored that the Supreme Court is weighing one of the most consequential privacy questions of the digital age: whether the government can use sweeping location data searches to identify a suspect,\u201d he said in a statement after the arguments. \u201cThe Court should hold that the Constitution protects our digital data even when it is stored by an app or cloud provider. The Court should ensure that the highly sensitive records generated by our phones cannot be obtained without particularized suspicion and close judicial oversight.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\tWritten by Tim Starks![\"Tim](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Tim-Starks-01.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\tTim Starks is senior reporter at CyberScoop. His previous stops include working at The Washington Post, POLITICO and Congressional Quarterly. An Evansville, Ind. native, he’s covered cybersecurity since 2003. Email Tim here: tim.starks@cyberscoop.com<\/a>.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Supreme Court justices lobbed sharp questions at both sides about the constitutionality of geofence warrants during oral arguments…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146],"tags":[29348,26420,812,535,29349,23199,536,5093],"class_list":{"0":"post-46708","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-john-roberts","8":"tag-electronic-privacy-information-center","9":"tag-fourth-amendment","10":"tag-google","11":"tag-john-roberts","12":"tag-orin-kerr","13":"tag-sonia-sotomayor","14":"tag-supreme-court","15":"tag-surveillance"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116478955110016344","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}