A federal judge last week ruled that a cellphone dragnet used to find bank robbery suspects was unconstitutional.
Judge M. Hannah Lauck, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, ruled Thursday that authorities violated the Constitution when they used Google location data to find people who were near the scene of a 2019 bank robbery, NBC News reported.
Lauck said the policing approach, by gathering information on innocent people without evidence that they might be suspects violated the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches.
Similar geofence warrants were used to identify people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Law enforcement authorities say geofence warrants are legal because Google users agree to have their location tracked.
Google released a statement saying the company was reviewing the court's decision.
"We vigorously protect the privacy of our users, including by pushing back on overly broad requests, while supporting the important work of law enforcement," a spokesperson, said, NBC News reported.
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said Lauck's "landmark" ruling could lead to more courts declining law enforcement's requests to use Google location data.
"This is going to be a wake-up call for the judges who have been rubber-stamping these sorts of warrants at the federal and state level," said Cahn, whose group is a civil rights nonprofit that opposes the use of geofence warrants.
Law enforcement groups have used geofence warrants in cases — from burglaries to murders and sexual assaults — where they have run out of leads using traditional investigation techniques.
However, defense lawyers and privacy advocates argue that the government is secretly collecting data from innocent people in order to find a potential suspect.
In a 2019 burglary investigation, a Florida man was caught after riding his bike past the scene.
Law enforcement authorities insist they work with Google to receive only anonymized data until they find a device that draws their suspicion. Police add that evidence provided by a geofence warrant alone is not enough to charge someone with a crime.
NBC News reported that the number of geofence warrants police submitted to Google has risen dramatically – from 982 in 2018 to 11,554 in 2020 – and warrants come from agencies in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the federal government.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.