WASHINGTON – Carrying a smartphone to a bank robbery wasn’t such a smart move for Okello Chatrie.
Now the Supreme Court must decide whether the “groundbreaking” and “previously unimaginable” way police tracked down Chatrie through his Samsung Galaxy S9 phone violated his Fourth Amendment protection from an unlawful search.
At stake in the case is whether the government can sift through voluminous data that exposes a phone’s location at a crime scene – without knowing who is holding it. Such a search through Google’s location data begins with a haystack of hundreds of millions of phones and enables the police to filter out a few that could lead to a suspect.
