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Friend,
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Chatrie v. United States, restricting the use of geofence warrants and recognizing that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cellphone location data. We’ve been sounding the alarm on geofence warrants for years, and this ruling is a major victory for privacy rights across the country.
With a normal warrant, police must show individualized probable cause. But with a geofence warrant, police can compel companies that collect location data to identify everyone in a certain location over a given period of time — meaning anyone at a protest, healthcare clinic, mosque, or entire neighborhood can be caught in the dragnet without being suspected of a crime.
This ruling is an important victory, but the fight is far from over. In March, the Center for Democracy & Technology, joined by S.T.O.P. and other civil rights and privacy organizations, filed an amicus brief urging SCOTUS to reject geofence warrants. But SCOTUS declined to fully strike down the overbroad, invasive surveillance tool as unconstitutional. Now lawmakers must finish the job.
Geofence warrants don’t make us safer. They put our movements, freedom of speech, and healthcare access at risk. Congress and state legislatures can and should outlaw these dragnet searches — along with reverse keyword warrants, which let police identify everyone who searched a given term online.
S.T.O.P. will continue fighting to make sure they do.
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