Regular readers may recall my prior coverage of United States v. Chatrie, a case on the Fourth Amendment implications of collecting Google location history records—location records stored by Google about where logged-in Google users are located—which in the Chatrie case were used to identify a bank robber. The Fourth Circuit handed down its ruling in the case yesterday, and I thought I would give a quick summary and offer some thoughts.
My 2022 post explained the technology, the facts, and the trial court's ruling, so please go there for the details, as I'd rather not repeat it all here. (Go ahead, really, I'll wait. Okay, back? Now let's continue.). As you'll recall from my 2022 post—which you just read, right?— the trial court in this case (1) assumed that collecting the records was a Fourth Amendment search; (2) adopted a very narrow view of how broadly warrants for such records can extend, under which the Chatrie geofence warrant was plainly unconstitutional; and then (3) upheld the collection of records anyway under the good-faith exception to the warrant requirement because it was such a novel issue. My 2022 post was skeptical of this, suggesting that no search may have occurred in the first place and that warrants should be a lot broader than what the district court concluded.
In the new ruling, the Fourth Circuit rules 2-1 that no search occurred. Judge Jay Richardson wrote the majority opinion, and he was joined by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, Judge James Wynn dissented. Here's the key reasoning from the majority opinion by Judge Richardson:
