In the first order of its kind, a federal district court has held that a warrant used to identify all devices in the area of a bank robbery, including the defendant’s, “plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment.” The court questioned whether similar warrants could ever be...| Electronic Frontier Foundation
Update December 14, 2021: After this post was published, on June 4, 2021, a federal magistrate judge in Kansas issued another opinion denying the government's application for a geofence warrant.Update May 17, 2021: Since this post was published, the court unsealed its July 24, 2020 opinion denying...| Electronic Frontier Foundation
Should the police be able to force Google to turn over identifying information on every phone within a certain geographic area—potentially hundreds or thousands of devices—just because a crime occurred there? We don’t think so. As we argued in an amicus brief filed recently in People v. Dawes, a...| Electronic Frontier Foundation
A California trial court has held a geofence warrant issued to the San Francisco Police Department violated the Fourth Amendment and California’s landmark electronic communications privacy law, CalECPA. The court suppressed evidence stemming from the warrant, becoming the first court in California...| Electronic Frontier Foundation
In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general,...| Electronic Frontier Foundation