In 2019, law enforcement officials in Virginia asked for Google's help in finding the man who robbed a credit union in Midlothian. They asked for and got the cellphone tower records of all the phones in the vicinity of the credit union at the time of the robbery, then used that data to arrest Okello Chatrie.
The request for cellphone tower data is called a geofence warrant, and they can contain data from literally thousands of people in a certain area who have nothing to do with any crime.
John Whitehead, founder of The Rutherford Institute, is an attorney and vocal advocate for civil liberties, who weighed in on the topic.
“Instead of requiring a government to identify a suspect, establish a probable cause before they conduct the search, these warrants — if you happen to be within a mile of an incident, you're a suspect,” Whitehead says.
According to SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court ruled that when law enforcement used the geofence warrant, it qualified as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. In a 6-3 ruling, the Chatrie’s case was sent back to the lower court for them to determine whether the search was “reasonable,” otherwise having probable cause.
Whitehead affirms the Supreme Court’s ruling as a “search” and the need to have probable cause for the police or the government to look up data and try to interfere with people’s rights, arrest or track them.
Governments tend to gravitate toward authoritarianism, he says, especially when run by socialist politicians like the Democrats finding.
“We're moving into, in my opinion, a techno-fascist state, where everything we say, do or whatever, everywhere we walk now, cameras are watching us, and we're all basically criminals in their eyes or potential criminals,” Whitehead says.
He then speaks on the ramifications on such views.
“If we don't have privacy, then we're not individuals, we're not real people, we're not human beings. They're creating a whole non-human class of folks that are to be controlled. Allow these things to go forward, we're going to lose every right we've ever had,” Whitehead says.
