Christopher Slobogin (Vanderbilt University – Law School) has posted The Implications of Chatrie: Are the Walls Tumbling Down? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In Chatrie v. United States the U.S. Supreme Court held that police use of geofencing is a search under the Fourth Amendment. But it did much more than that. It also punched a huge hole in the third party doctrine, widening the damage already inflicted by Carpenter v. United States. More importantly still, the decision continues the Court’s slow recognition that the unitary probable cause standard—the idea that if police are conducting a “search” they always need probable cause—simply doesn’t work, especially in a digital age where searches often involve accessing information about large numbers of innocent people. Finally, the opinion helps provide a template for how courts should deal with what I have called “event-based searches,” searches triggered not by a desire to find out more about a suspect but rather by an event, usually a crime, that provides information allowing police to link the event to persons of interest. That template may require policymakers—whether they are legislatures or courts—to think hard about the types of events police may digitally investigate.
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