Supreme Court ruling guts government's use of geofence warrants
arstechnica.com

... SCOTUS falls short of deeming geofence warrants unconstitutional, though.

The Fourth Amendment protects a user's "location history," the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The same logic already applied to a cellphone's tracking, and the high court found "no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History" collected by third parties like Google.

Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone's location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.

The decision came in a case where cops used so-called geofence warrants to track down an armed bank robber from a list of all phones logged in the area. Applying a three-part process, cops worked with Google to narrow down the list of suspects and eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who had opted in to share his location with Google every few minutes. Chatrie was sentenced to 12 years in prison but challenged the geofence warrant as an unconstitutional search.

The US tried and failed to argue that no search was conducted under the Fourth Amendment, partly because they only searched a little bit of Chatrie's location data, which the government considered too small to warrant privacy protections. ...