Andrew Guthrie Ferguson (George Washington University – Law School) has posted Everything-Everywhere Searches and the Geofence Puzzle (George Washington Journal of Law & Technology (Jan. 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Police surveillance technologies have outpaced Fourth Amendment doctrine. Arbitrary, generalized search powers stretching across entire cities and states now exist in forms that have no historical analog. Police can now search “everything everywhere all at once” and current Fourth Amendment doctrine has little to say about the resulting privacy and security threats.
This Symposium Essay addresses the “everything-everywhere” search problem with two goals in mind. First, it seeks to identify the technological and doctrinal problems of this type of AI-enhanced surveillance power. Policing technologies that arbitrarily rummage through vast streams of data for suspicious activities raise new and distinct Fourth Amendment concerns upending the traditional threshold search analysis.
The second goal of this Essay is to offer a new analytical lens to reframe everything-everywhere searches, focusing on the harm of rummaging. My argument, in brief, is that the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect against a type of overbroad, generalized rummaging power. While the act of physically searching homes and papers was of obvious concern, the power to conduct the search – i.e., general warrants and the writs of assistance – was of paramount concern. Grants of unreasonable rummaging power to government agents raise this rummaging concern. My argument here is that everything-everywhere surveillance technologies (or laws granting such surveillance powers) need to be judged against the rummaging principle that examines arbitrariness, overreach, intrusions on constitutionally protected interests, and threats of exposure. As will be explained, this rummaging principle helps clarify both the threshold search question and the resulting harm left unaddressed under the reasonable expectation of privacy test and our existing warrant practice.
After setting out the technological and constitutional problems of everything-everywhere surveillance, I will apply my digital rummaging analysis to the specific problem of geofence requests and geofence warrants. Geofence investigations offer a fascinating test case for the everything-everywhere-policing-problem, and the digital rummaging theory provides the solution to this hard Fourth Amendment puzzle.