Some people misunderstand my problem with Flock and all of the other surveillance we have been talking about. The cameras aren’t the violation. It’s the infinite, searchable database that SCOTUS has held in regards to Geofencing and cellular location data that violates the 4th Amendment.
The moment a government agent can type in my plates or other identifying information into a query and get hits on everywhere I’ve traveled, that constitutes a search under the 4th amendment and requires a warrant. The Supreme Court agrees with me on this one.
The Supreme Court has already ruled on this in three different cases. SCOTUS ruled in Carpenter v. US (2018) that a person does not “surrender Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.”
The 2018 Supreme Court decision regarding the expectation of privacy is the landmark case Carpenter v. United States. In a 5-4 ruling, the Court held that individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their physical movements and location history, even when that data is collected and stored by third-party wireless carriers (Cell-Site Location Information, or CSLI). The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, determined that the government’s warrantless acquisition of historical CSLI constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and generally requires a warrant supported by probable cause.
United States v. Jones (2012) and Chatrie v. United States (2026) significantly limit law enforcement’s ability to use movement data without judicial oversight. In Jones, the Supreme Court held that attaching a GPS tracking device to a suspect’s vehicle and monitoring the vehicle’s movements constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, generally requiring a warrant. The Court recognized that prolonged electronic tracking reveals detailed information about a person’s private life and therefore implicates constitutional privacy protections.
Building on that principle, Chatrie held that police access to digital location data through a geofence warrant is also a Fourth Amendment search because individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information. The Court concluded that law enforcement cannot use broad geofence warrants to identify everyone present near a crime scene without satisfying the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity. Together, Jones and Chatrie establish that both physical GPS tracking and the collection of digital movement data generally require a warrant, reflecting the Court’s recognition that modern location-tracking technologies can reveal the “whole of a person’s physical movements” and therefore deserve strong constitutional protection.
The unlikely pairing of Alito and Sotomayor have both written how long term electronic monitoring and databases raise serious privacy concerns.
Following the line of reasoning in those three cases leads to the conclusion you can’t collect my cellphone location data without a warrant (Carpenter). You can’t collect my google location data without a warrant (Chatrie), and you can’t collect my OnStar or other GPS data without a warrant (Jones).
The idea that law enforcement believes that in spite of these three rulings from SCOTUS, they can erect a network of camera surveillance to track the movements of everyone, everywhere, at all times and store it into database that they can search without a warrant is absurd and is antithetical to a free people.
