Statement Regarding Chatrie v. United States Decision

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 29, 2026 — The Supreme Court today in Chatrie v. United States held that the government conducts a search when it uses a geofence warrant to compel a technology company to produce a user’s location records. 

The following is the statement of Ashley Baker, Executive Director of the Committee for Justice:

"Today, the Supreme Court majority recognized that an individual retains a constitutionally protected interest in the record of his movements even when a third party holds it. This is the outcome the Committee for Justice has urged since Carpenter, in an amicus brief arguing that the government may not turn a cell phone into a tracking device without a warrant.

The Fourth Amendment protects ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects.’ Nothing in that text vanishes because a citizen’s records happen to rest on a company’s servers. The third-party doctrine of Smith v. Maryland and United States v. Miller — the notion that one forfeits all constitutional protection in anything shared with a provider — is irreconcilable with that text, and Chatrie confirms that it does not govern the digital record of a person’s every movement. 

A geofence warrant inverts the warrant requirement, allowing the government to search everyone in an area first and identify its suspect afterward. That is the digital descendant of the general warrant the Fourth Amendment was written to abolish, and the violation does not turn on what the search happens to reveal — the indiscriminate search is itself the injury.

Notably, Justice Gorsuch's concurrence shows the Court the property-based path it has yet to fully take. In 2018 I wrote that the future of the Fourth Amendment might rest in his hands, because he urged the Court to discard both the reasonable expectation test of Katz v. United States and its third-party-doctrine offshoot in favor of the property-based understanding of the Fourth Amendment.

Justice Gorsuch again made the case that a person’s location data is his property, his ‘papers’ and ‘effects,’ and the government searched it. That approach, which Justice Scalia revived in United States v. Jones and which Justice Gorsuch had sketched even before Carpenter, gives the law a standard rooted in text and history, not one that bends to judicial intuition about which expectations society is prepared to honor.

We should be candid about the decision’s limits. As in Carpenter, the majority reached its result through the reasonable-expectation framework and the revealing nature of the data, it narrowed the third-party doctrine without discarding it, and it left Justice Gorsuch’s property theory in a separate opinion rather than adopting it for the Court.”

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Media Contact: Ashley Baker, abaker@committeeforjustice.org; (704) 214-0542