Le[e]gal Brief: Does The Government Have The Right To Access Your Data?

“Right now, every single one of you watching is carrying a tracking device in your pocket. It knows where you pray, it knows where you protest, it knows what doctor you saw last Tuesday and what corner you stood on last Friday,” attorney Lee Merritt says at the start of this week’s Le[e]gal Brief. 

One of the conspiracy theories I consistently find hilarious is the fear that the government is trying to put a chip in people through vaccines, because in this day and age, they don’t need to put a chip in us to know where we’re at. By virtue of phones, social media, and even online shopping, we’re already willingly giving them our location and personal info daily. This week’s Le[e]gal Brief focuses on a case the Supreme Court is currently hearing about whether or not the government should have unrestricted access to our digital footprint. 

In May 2019, an armed man walked into a federal credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, and managed to steal nearly $200,000. After some time had passed and the investigation stalled out, the authorities served Google a “geofence warrant.”

“A geofence warrant is a digital dragnet,” Merritt explains in the video. “The police draw a circle on a map, and in this case, 150 meters around the bank, and they tell Google, ‘give us every device that pinged your servers inside the circle the hour before the robbery and the hour after it.’”

The geofence warrant wasn’t only targeting the bank, but it also included a church, a restaurant, and a busy public road. “[Google] handed back 19 anonymous hits, police narrowed it down to nine, then they named three,” Merritt explains. “One of them was Okello Chatrie. He pled guilty, he got nearly 12 years, and then he appealed.”

Chatrie’s case has now made it up to the Supreme Court, who are debating whether or not the geofence warrant violated Chatrie’s Fourth Amendment rights. “Chatrie’s side says this is a general warrant, and a general warrant is the exact thing the Fourth Amendment was written to destroy,” Merrit says in the video. 

The Fourth Amendment was designed to require authorities to specifically name a person, what they’re looking for, and provide probable cause for why they’re searching. “A geofence flips that on its head. It searches first, then looks for a suspect later,” Merritt says. “The Fourth Amendment doesn’t promise police every conviction. It promises us, the people, that they have to respect our privacy while they do their job.” 

Later in this week’s Le[e]gal Brief, Lee Merritt explains the wide-ranging implications that could occur should the Supreme Court rule against Chatrie. Now more than ever, it feels like the courts and the federal government are trying to renegotiate the rights afforded to us by the Constitution and by previously established laws. 

If you want to know more about these attacks and what you can do to protect yourself against them, then don’t miss your weekly Le[e]gal Brief. 

SEE ALSO:

This Week’s Le[e]gal Brief: Protecting Your Personal Data

Le[e]gal Brief: The Disturbing Rise Of ‘Comply Or Die’ Policing