WASHINGTON, DC – Following oral argument at the Supreme Court this morning in Chatrie v. United States, a case in which the Court is considering whether “geofence warrants” violate the Fourth Amendment, Constitutional Accountability Center Deputy Chief Counsel Brian Frazelle issued the following reaction:

This morning’s argument illustrated the challenges the digital age poses to preserving our Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable government searches. Although the Justices asked difficult questions of both sides and could resolve the case in various ways, most Justices appeared skeptical of the government’s broadest arguments.

As the Justices seemed to recognize, allowing the government to exploit the GPS data generated by our cell phones to track our every movement—without adequate judicial oversight—risks compromising the privacy of our homes, the security of places of worship, and the protection afforded to other data that we routinely store with third-party companies like Google, such as photos and written documents.

These justifiable concerns reflect the text and history of the Fourth Amendment. As our amicus brief discusses, the Amendment explicitly guarantees “the people” the “right to be secure” against unreasonable searches. And as history shows, at every stage of events leading up to the Amendment, an overriding concern was that giving the government unrestrained search authority violates the security of everyone who is vulnerable to that authority, whether or not they end up being singled out for scrutiny.

Today, cell-phone GPS data constantly records private details about our movements and activities, which can be retraced years after the fact. Allowing the government to access this data without meaningful judicial guardrails would undermine the people’s right to be secure in their persons and property.