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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has issued a landmark ruling, declaring geofence warrants unconstitutional.
In a decision handed down on August 9, 2024, the court found that geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The ruling applies to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and could reshape law enforcement practices across these states.
The court’s decision reads in part that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment” as they constitute “general, exploratory rummaging” that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. The ruling emphasizes that these warrants fail to meet constitutional standards because they do not specify a particular user to be identified.
Geofence warrants allow law enforcement to collect location data from all devices within a specified area and time frame. It often involves compelling companies like Google to provide information from their vast location history databases. The Fifth Circuit’s decision comes from a case involving a 2018 postal truck robbery, where such a warrant was used to identify suspects.
This decision creates a circuit split with the Fourth Circuit, which recently ruled in a separate case that obtaining location data from Google did not constitute a Fourth Amendment violation.
Recent Pushback Against Geofence Warrants
Geofence warrants have long been a subject of debate among privacy advocates, legal experts, and map providers like Google. In a move against the warrant, Google, last year, announced it would encrypt users’ Google Maps location history and give users the option to store location history on their devices.
This ruling marks a remarkable victory for those who have argued that such warrants are overly broad and infringe on the privacy rights of innocent individuals.
While the court found geofence warrants unconstitutional, it did not dismiss the evidence obtained in the postal robbery case, citing the good faith of the police in relying on the warrant. Nevertheless, this ruling makes the use of geofence warrants unlawful in the states under the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction – Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
