SCOTUS Just Issued Its Biggest Privacy Ruling in Nearly a Decade – Mother Jones
SCOTUS Just Issued Its Biggest Privacy Ruling in Nearly a Decade – Mother Jones
Publish Date: 2026-07-02 07:30:00
Source Domain: www.motherjones.com
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court found that police need a warrant to search people’s location data. Mother Jones; Jonas Leupe; Robert Nickelsberg/Getty
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The Supreme Court dealt Big Brother a blow on Monday with a landmark ruling for digital privacy rights in Chatrie v. United States. Conservative Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch joined the liberal bloc of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in finding that smartphone location data is subject to privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment. Though consequential, the case has gone largely overlooked amid this week’s deluge of high-profile rulings, including the decision to block President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order attempting to overturn the guarantee of birthright citizenship. It marks the Court’s first decision on digital surveillance since 2018, when it found that law enforcement’s warrantless search of cell site location history violated the Fourth Amendment.
To better understand the implications of Chatrie, I hopped on the phone with Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. The Center filed an amicus brief in the case alongside the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU. Glaberson helped break down Chatrie and what the Court’s ruling means in an age of growing digital surveillance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
At the center of Chatrie is law enforcement’s use of a “geofence warrant” to identify the potential suspect of a bank robbery in 2019. What are geofence warrants, and how do they differ from regular search warrants?
A geofence warrant is one of the kinds of warrants that people sometimes refer to as “reverse warrants.” When you think about a traditional warrant, the…
