Just before 5 p.m. on May 20, a gunman walked into a bank in Midlothian, Virginia, forced a worker to open a safe and fled with $195,000. Security footage showed the man holding a cellphone to his ear just before the robbery, a detail that led police to attempt a surveillance technique that is growing in popularity among American law enforcement agencies.
When authorities had not identified the suspect a few weeks after the robbery, an officer got a warrant for Google's location data from all the cellphones that had been in the area of the Call Federal Credit Union bank during the heist.
That is what Chatrie's lawyers are now arguing, in what may be the first case in which a defendant is fighting the use of a geofence warrant to charge him with a crime. "It is the digital equivalent of searching every home in the neighborhood of a reported burglary, or searching the bags of every person walking along Broadway because of a theft in Times Square," Chatrie's lawyers said in an October court filing.
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