Supreme Court considers limits of geofence warrants in Fourth Amendment case

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Moving now to the Supreme Court. The court is now hearing arguments in a landmark case that could impact the Fourth Amendment. Justices must now weigh the legality of geoence warrants and whether investigators are justified in scanning cell phone data in hopes of finding a suspect or person of interest.

[00:00:18]A decision in this case is due by the end of June. And ABC News's legal analyst Brian Buckmeer joins me now for more on this case. Brian, great to see you. Thanks for joining us. So, let's start with what is a geoence warrant and is this a common thing used by investigators in criminal cases?

[00:00:37]>> Hi Stephanie, always a pleasure. So, geofencing is taking the crime scene and then going to a service provider, typically Google, and saying uh law enforcement saying, "We need all of the digital information and any kind of tracking or or location information for this specific time and this specific location." And it's taking all of those people, whether or not they're suspected of a crime or just a simple innocent bystander, and taking that large pool, whittling it down to a smaller pool, and then law enforcement ultimately saying, "Okay, we need these fused cell phones or these uh people's information because we believe that these people are the heart of the crime scene at the exact time which the crime occurred." It's a it's a bit of a wide sweeping net uh to get to collect information. And as you know, currently police officers must obtain warrants to seek information from a specific subject in a crime. How could this case impact the Fourth Amendment?

[00:01:30]>> Yeah. So, kind of answering the bit of the first question as well, this is a growing trend just because it is a tool that law enforcement does have uh where you don't have the suspect in custody or you might have lost the suspect. We've covered a lot of high-profile cases, whether it be Luigi Manion or others, whether are manhunts, not just in a city or or county, but across state lines.

[00:01:49]And so officers still need probable cause to some extent, right? You still need the fact that someone committed a crime in a specific location, what that crime is. You might need to have some sort of evidence, maybe a surveillance video like we see in the Supreme Court case where you can see the person using a cell phone. So law enforcement has the ability to say, "Hey, we know they use a cell phone. We know that they're here at a time of crime. We have this video surveillance. this is enough for a probable cause because we see that a crime occurred. Let's go now and cast this net of getting everyone's location inside of a set area so we can whittle it down to who we believe is the actual suspect in this case.

[00:02:21]>> And in what scenario uh can people stand their ground against a phone search in general?

[00:02:30]>> So, this is a difficult aspect of this case because a lot of these arguments that we're hearing are part of the exceptions to a warrantless search. And the big one here is consent. And a part of the argument that the justices are hearing is that well when you sign up for an account whether it be on Google or another cell phone or a cell phone provider in many ways when you have your location on or you're sharing a location with a loved one or someone else you're making that information public not only to your cell phone provider but to law enforcement uh where there are some conditions in the agreement that your information can be shared with law enforcement. And so I guess the greatest protection, and it did come up with some of the justices, turn off your your your location sharing, turn off any application that allows to show when and where you are at a certain given time.

[00:03:15]And that would give you an expectation of privacy that if um law enforcement did want to dig into your information, you can say, "I had an expectation of privacy. You dug into my information when I had this application turned off in a way that you should not see me."

[00:03:28]Then you can protect yourself. But if you leave it on and open, it seems at least by some of the arguments we hear today, that might allow for some of your information to get swept up in these geo fencing warrants.

[00:03:38]>> Really helpful, Brian. Thank you so much.