You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States. The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have […]
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This posted was drafted by EFF legal intern Alexandra Halbeck The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California and most of the Western U.S., just delivered good news for digital privacy: abandoning a phone doesn’t abandon your Fourth Amendment rights in the phone’s contents. In United States v. Hunt, the court made […]
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This post was co-authored by EFF legal intern Noam Shemtov. We are in a constant dialogue with Internet search engines, ranging from the mundane to the confessional. We ask search engines everything: What movies are playing (and which are worth seeing)? Where’s the nearest clinic (and how do I get there)? Who’s running in the […]
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Another federal appeals court has ruled on controversial geofence warrants—sort of. Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sitting en banc issued a single sentence opinion affirming the lower court opinion in United States v. Chatrie. The practical outcome of this sentence is clear: the evidence collected from a geofence warrant […]
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In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment […]
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