Geofence warrants to be tested in Virginia bank robbery case

RICHMOND, Va. — It was a terrifying bank robbery: Demanding cash in a handwritten note, a man waved a gun, threatened to kill a teller’s family, ordered employees and customers onto the floor and escaped with $195,000.

Surveillance video gave authorities a lead, showing a man holding a cellphone outside the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Va., on May 20, 2019. So like a growing number of law enforcement agencies, they got a court-approved “geofence” search warrant, seeking the location history of any devices in the area at the time.

Google is served with the vast majority of these warrants because it stores information from millions of devices in a massive database known as Sensorvault. If your Android phone or iPhone has Location History enabled, this is where your data is tracked and stored.

Now geofence warrants are getting their first significant court challenge. Lawyers for Okello Chatrie want a federal judge to suppress the warrant that led to his arrest for the bank heist.

In Mr. Chatrie’s case, bank cameras showed the robber came and went from an area where a church worker saw a suspicious person in a blue Buick. Mr. Chatrie’s Location History matched these movements.

Prosecutors say he confessed after officers found a gun and nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the teller.

Mr. Chatrie’s lawyers say the evidence should be suppressed because it came from the geofence warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.

“It is the digital equivalent of searching every home in the neighborhood of a reported burglary, or searching the bags of every person walking along Broadway because of a theft in Times Square,” the lawyers wrote.

Privacy advocates say such broad warrants inherently sweep up innocent people.