The Fourth Amendment was designed to stop a specific kind of government behavior: searching the many to find the one. The founders knew about general warrants — the British instruments that authorized officers to search anyone, anywhere, for anything the crown wished to find — because those warrants had been used against them. The prohibition they wrote was specific: warrants must describe the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized. Particularity. Probable cause. Judicial authorization. Three requirements, stated plainly, are violated systematically whenever a government finds them inconvenient.

On April 27, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chatrie v. United States, the first direct constitutional challenge to geofence warrants. A geofence warrant doesn’t start with a suspect. It starts with a location and a time window, then compels a technology company — Google, in this case — to search the location history of every device in that area and return identifying information for users that the government then decides looks interesting. In Chatrie’s case, police identified 19 devices near a 2019 Virginia bank robbery, requested expanded data on nine, and ultimately de-anonymized three — one of whom was Okello Chatrie. He was convicted and sentenced to nearly 12 years.