Amicus Curiae Brief — Okello T. Chatrie, Petitioner v. United States

No. 25-112

In the Supreme Court of the United States

OKELLO T. CHATRIE, Petitioner,

v.

UNITED STATES

On Writ of Certiorari to

the United States Court of Appeals

for the Fourth Circuit

BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE

PROJECT FOR PRIVACY & SURVEILLANCE

ACCOUNTABILITY, INC.

SUPPORTING PETITIONER

GENE C. SCHAERR

Counsel of Record

ERIK S. JAFFE

JUSTIN A. MILLER

SCHAERR | JAFFE LLP

1717 K Street NW, Suite 900

Washington, DC 20006

(202) 787-1060

gschaerr@schaerr-jaffe.com

Counsel for Amicus Curiae

MARCH 2, 2026

QUESTION PRESENTED

The question presented is:

Whether the execution of the geofence warrant

violated the Fourth Amendment.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

QUESTION PRESENTED ........................................... i

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES ....................................... iii

INTRODUCTION, SUMMARY, AND

INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE ......................... 1

ARGUMENT ................................................................ 2

I.

II.

Geofence Warrants Are General

Warrants Prohibited by the Fourth

Amendment. .................................................... 3

A.

Founding Era Americans

recognized general warrants as

instruments of arbitrary power and

oppression. ............................................... 3

B.

Geofence warrants replicate—and

exceed—the vices of general

warrants through mass,

suspicionless digital rummaging. ........... 6

Geofence Warrants Pose Unique Threats

to Religious Freedom and Associational

Rights. ........................................................... 10

A.

Geofence warrants facilitate

collateral and targeted intrusions

into sensitive First Amendment

spaces. .................................................... 11

B.

In the digital age, First Amendment

sensitive spaces are at risk more

than ever. ............................................... 12

CONCLUSION .......................................................... 16

iii

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

Cases

Page(s)

Boyd v. United States,

116 U.S. 616 (1886) .................................................. 5

Carpenter v. United States,

585 U.S. 296 (2018) ..................................... 1-6, 9, 15

Coolidge v. New Hampshire,

403 U.S. 443 (1971) .............................................. 6, 8

Entick v. Carrington,

19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 95 Eng. Rep. 807

(K.B. 1765)................................................................ 4

Marcus v. Search Warrant,

367 U.S. 717 (1961) ................................................ 11

Olmstead v. United States,

277 U.S. 438 (1928) .................................................. 5

Pennsylvania v. Kurtz,

348 A.3d 133 (Pa. 2025) ......................................... 15

Riley v. California,

573 U.S. 373 (2014) .............................................. 6, 9

Stanford v. Texas,

379 U.S. 476 (1965) ................................... 3-5, 10, 11

Steagald v. United States,

451 U.S. 204 (1981) .................................................. 6

United States v. Jones,

565 U.S. 400 (2012) ................................................ 10

United States v. Smith,

110 F.4th 817 (5th Cir. 2024) ............................. 7-10

Wells v. State,

714 S.W.3d 614 (Tex. Crim. App. 2025) ................ 12

iv

Wilkes v. Wood,

19 How. St. Tr. 1153, 98 Eng. Rep. 489

(K.B. 1763)................................................................ 4

Constitutional Provision

U.S. Const. amend. IV ................................................. 3

Other Authorities

Tyler Arnold,

FBI Used Undercover Agent To Investigate

Catholics, Says Weaponization Committee

Chairman, EWTN News (Apr. 11, 2023 PM) ....... 13

Ahmad Austin Jr.,

‘Dystopian’ Super Bowl Ad for Ring Camera

Gets Bipartisan Blowback: ‘Propaganda

for Mass Surveillance,’ Mediaite

(Feb. 9, 2026, 11:05 AM) ........................................ 14

Thomas Brewster,

AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate

All Crime In America, Forbes (Sep. 3, 2025) ........ 14

Decl. of Independence (U.S. 1776) .............................. 3

Omar Gallaga,

Days After Its Super Bowl Ad, Ring Cancels

Flock Partnership Amid Surveillance

Concerns, CNET (Feb. 13, 2026) ........................... 14

Chuck Grassley,

Grassley Oversight Unveils Disturbing Extent

of FBI’s Anti-Catholic Bias (June 3, 2025) ........... 13

John Adams’s Reconstruction of

Otis’s Speech in the Writs of Assistance

Case, in Collected Political Writings of James

Otis (Richard A. Samuelson ed., Liberty Fund

2015) ......................................................................... 5

v

Jocelyn Kaiser,

A Judge Said Police Can Search the DNA of

1 Million Americans Without Their Consent.

What’s Next? Science (Nov. 7, 2019) ...................... 15

Proj. Priv. & Surveillance Accountability, Inc.,

Flock Partners with Ring–“It’s a

Warrantless Day in the Neighborhood!”

(Oct. 20, 2025) ........................................................ 14

Proj. Priv. & Surveillance Accountability, Inc.,

AI Drones Sharpen the Security/Privacy

Tradeoff of a Surveillance State

(Oct. 30, 2025) ........................................................ 14

Nicholas Reimann,

FBI Director Subpoenaed By House GOP

Over Monitoring ‘Traditionalist’ Catholics,

Forbes (Apr. 10, 2023, 3:25 PM) ............................ 13

Richard A. Samuelson,

Introduction: The Life, Times, and

Political Writings of James Otis, in

Collected Political Writings of James Otis

(Richard A. Samuelson ed., Liberty Fund

2015) ......................................................................... 5

Staff of H. Comm. on the Judiciary,

How the Biden-Wray FBI Manufactured a

False Narrative of Catholic Americans as

Violent Extremists, 119th Cong. (2025) ................ 13

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries,

Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for

the Police, N.Y. Times (Apr. 13, 2019) .................... 8

INTRODUCTION, SUMMARY, AND

INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE 1

Geofence warrants are modern general warrants

that violate the Fourth Amendment. Because they

collect location data on all persons, regardless of

individualized cause or suspicion, in the fenced area,

they also pose particularly acute threats to religious

freedom and associational rights protected by the First

Amendment. In this case, the geofence warrant

encompassed

Journey

Christian

Church

in

Midlothian, Virginia, thus surveilling and violating

the privacy of anyone who was visiting the church for

worship, work, or counselling.

The core principles underlying this Court’s

Fourth Amendment caselaw lead inexorably to the

conclusion that geofence warrants and the

increasingly widespread practice of retrospective

tracking violate the Constitution. Those practices are

incompatible, as this Court put it in Carpenter v.

United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), with “that degree

of privacy against government that existed when the

Fourth Amendment was adopted.” Id. at 305 (citation

omitted). But federal and state courts continue to treat

Carpenter as the exception rather than the rule. This

Court should reverse the Fourth Circuit to clarify that

it meant what it said in Carpenter.

Because of the serious privacy issues geofence

warrants raise, they are of particular concern to

1 This brief was not authored in whole or in part by counsel for

any party and no person or entity other than amicus curiae or its

counsel has made a monetary contribution toward the brief’s

preparation or submission.

2

Amicus Curiae Project for Privacy & Surveillance

Accountability, Inc. (PPSA), a nonprofit, nonpartisan

organization dedicated to protecting privacy rights.

PPSA urges the Court to hold that Americans have a

reasonable expectation of privacy in even short-term

portions of long-term tracking databases, and thereby

ensure that Fourth Amendment rights are not left “at

the mercy of advancing technology.” Carpenter, 585

U.S. at 305 (citation omitted).

ARGUMENT

Amicus agrees with Petitioner (at 32-42) that

geofence warrants are general warrants prohibited by

the Fourth Amendment and his argument (at 2, 24,

51) that they often involve collateral intrusions into

First Amendment sensitive spaces like places of

worship. Simply put, geofence warrants violate the

Fourth Amendment by enabling suspicionless,

exploratory searches of all persons who happen to be

carrying a cell phone or other GPS-enabled device

while present in any location the government sees fit

to surveil. And often this mass surveillance of

geofenced areas contains constitutionally protected

spaces such as religious venues, which threatens

religious liberty and association, warranting

heightened scrutiny under this Court’s precedents.

The Fourth Circuit’s narrow reading of Carpenter thus

threatens to leave Americans “at the mercy of

advancing technology,” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 305

(citation omitted), as it lays bare their private lives,

including their religious beliefs, practices, and

association.

3

I.

Geofence Warrants Are General Warrants

Prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

No government intrusion offends the Fourth

Amendment more than mass, generalized searches—

the very British abuses that sparked the American

revolution. Stanford v. Texas, 379 U.S. 476, 481

(1965). Geofence warrants manifest this same offense

today as mass, suspicionless searches of intimate

location data. Yet this Court held in Carpenter that

individuals retain a reasonable expectation of privacy

in the “whole of their physical movements” over time,

a broad principle not confined to that case’s facts. 585

U.S. at 310. Like the search in Carpenter, geofence

warrants enable retrospective tracking of every

passerby’s physical movements at any time and place

the government selects—i.e., every time and place—

inverting the constitutional order: suspicion follows

the search. The Founders would surely have included

such warrants in that “long train of abuses” tending

toward “absolute Despotism.” Decl. of Independence

para. 2 (U.S. 1776).

A.

Founding Era Americans recognized

general warrants as instruments of

arbitrary power and oppression.

The Fourth Amendment expressly protects “[t]he

right of the people to be secure in their persons,

houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable

searches

and

seizures,”

requiring

warrants

“particularly describing the place to be searched, and

the persons or things to be seized.” U.S. Const. amend.

IV. This provision was an affirmance of common-law

safeguards against general warrants, which

4

empowered officials to search, among other things,

without particularized suspicion. Carpenter, 585 U.S.

at 303-304 (citation omitted). By this amendment, the

Framers sought to prevent “a too permeating police

surveillance.” Ibid. (citation omitted).

This Court has detailed the “history of the use of

general warrants as instruments of oppression from

the time of the Tudors, through the Star Chamber, the

Long Parliament, the Restoration, and beyond.”

Stanford, 379 U.S. at 482. Indeed, general warrants

systematically

suppressed

dissent—targeting

Catholic and Puritan literature in Tudor England, and

later seditious libel. Ibid. (citation omitted).

General warrants, moreover, were condemned in

the “landmark cases” of Entick v. Carrington, 19

How. St. Tr. 1029, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (K.B. 1765), and

Wilkes v. Wood, 19 How. St. Tr. 1153, 98 Eng. Rep. 489

(K.B. 1763). Stanford, 379 U.S. at 483. The more

famous Entick decision involved the ransacking of

Entick’s home based on an overly broad general

warrant that “specifically nam[ed] [Entick] and [his]

publication, and authoriz[ed] his arrest for seditious

libel and the seizure of his ‘books and papers.’”

Stanford, 379 U.S. at 483. But modern digital searches

more often resemble the circumstances in Wilkes,

which involved a warrant ordering the search for “the

authors, printers, and publishers of a [specifically

named] seditious and treasonable paper.” Stanford,

379 U.S. at 483. That warrant meant those enforcing

it “held in their hands the liberty of every man whom

they were pleased to suspect.” Ibid. The English Court

of Common Pleas rightly held that warrant to be “a

5

ridiculous warrant against the whole English nation.”

Ibid.

That outrage against general warrants took firm

root in the American colonies. The Founding

generation declared general warrants to be “the worst

instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of

English liberty and the fundamental principles of law,

that ever was found in an English law book.” 2 When

President John Adams later reflected on the events

leading up to the birth of the United States, he wrote

that it was “[t]hen and there” during James Otis’s

famous speech decrying general warrants that “the

Child Independence was born.” 3

Since then, this Court has consistently held up

general warrants as the classic example of

government overreach that the Fourth Amendment

was designed to prevent. See, e.g., Carpenter, 585 U.S.

at 303-304; Stanford, 379 U.S. at 481-482; Olmstead v.

United States, 277 U.S. 438, 463 (1928); Boyd v.

United States, 116 U.S. 616, 624-627 (1886). Now in

Petitioner’s case, general warrants again rear their

ugly heads, this time manifesting as geofence

warrants.

2 John Adams’s Reconstruction of Otis’s Speech in the Writs of

Assistance Case, in Collected Political Writings of James Otis 11,

11 (Richard A. Samuelson ed., Liberty Fund 2015),

https://tinyurl.com/2zhmukac.

3 Richard

A. Samuelson, Introduction: The Life, Times, and

Political Writings of James Otis, in Collected Political Writings of

James Otis, at x (Richard A. Samuelson ed., Liberty Fund 2015)

(citation omitted).

6

B.

Geofence warrants replicate—and

exceed—the vices of general warrants

through mass, suspicionless digital

rummaging.

If Founding Era police dragnets provoked such

revulsion, the Framers would doubtless have recoiled

at modern geofence warrants that compel a single

provider hosting the private papers of millions to

search vast repositories of their intimate location

data—without particularized suspicion—which then

yields target lists for discretionary further searching.

Like despised general warrants, geofence warrants

“specif[y] only an offense,” leaving “to the discretion of

the executing officials the decision as to * * * which

places should be searched.” Steagald v. United States,

451 U.S. 204, 220 (1981). They thus permit the

“general, exploratory rummaging” the Fourth

Amendment was designed to prevent. Coolidge v. New

Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 467 (1971); see also Riley v.

California, 573 U.S. 373, 403 (2014). Worse yet,

geofence

warrants

do

not

merely

operate

prospectively; they permit virtual time travel,

allowing the government to retrospectively surveil the

movement of virtually any and all persons at any time

and place, all with data gathered without any

particularized suspicion.

This Court previously targeted retrospective

digital tracking in Carpenter, focusing on the “depth,

breadth, and comprehensive reach” of stored location

information and the ease of retracing movements. 585

U.S. at 309-310, 320. But lower courts have failed to

apply that decision faithfully. Carpenter was never

meant to be limited to its facts or to the details of how

7

the government asked for such comprehensive data to

be sliced and diced. 4

Thus, efforts to portray geofence warrants as

narrowly tailored are misleading and misdirected.

While the results of a geofence warrant may be

narrow, the search itself is not. Having the stored

location data of virtually all persons at the

government’s disposal is not negated by the fact that

the government accesses it in smaller chunks. A

general warrant cannot be saved simply by arguing

that after the broad search has been performed, the

second tier of information received was narrowly

tailored to the crime being investigated.

When law enforcement compels a company to

search its entire database of hundreds of millions of

accounts for even anonymized data, it engages in a

mass, suspicionless search. Narrowing that search

within temporal and geographic bounds may shrink

the size of the digital dragnet, but a dragnet it

remains. When law enforcement requests a geofence

warrant, they are unaware of the suspects’ identities,

or even whether any results will emerge. See United

States v. Smith, 110 F.4th 817, 836-837 (5th Cir.

2024). This practice is quintessential “general,

4 For that same reason, it is irrelevant that geofence warrants are

now less feasible because technology companies have changed or

may change their storage practices—in Google’s case, centralized

Sensorvault storage for Location History has been phased out.

See BIO 18. The constitutional problem with compelling

technology companies to retrospectively search users’ locations is

not limited to a single technology or app, anymore than

Carpenter’s circumstances were limited to a specific cell phone

carrier.

8

exploratory rummaging.” Coolidge, 403 U.S. at 467.

Even Google’s former Maps creator called these

warrants “fishing expedition[s],” and explained that

Google employees originally assumed law enforcement

would only seek Location History data on specific

people—which obviously did not occur. 5

These geofence fishing expeditions inherently

lack particularity except perhaps in extreme cases

where every person in an exceedingly narrow geofence

satisfies probable cause—a showing absent in this

case. Here the geofence warrant described no specific

user, only a location and time where a suspect might

have appeared in the past. As the Fifth Circuit

recognized, the “constitutionality of reverse warrants

is highly suspect because, like general warrants * * *

they permit searches of vast quantities of private,

personal information without identifying any

particular criminal suspects or demonstrating

probable cause to believe evidence will be located in

the corporate databases they search.” Smith, 110

F.4th at 838 (citation omitted). “Indeed, the

quintessential problem with these warrants is that

they never include a specific user to be identified, only

a temporal and geographic location where any given

user may turn up post-search.” Id. at 837.

The dragnet fishing expeditions that geofence

warrants allow are not restricted to a small pond, but

instead sweep in the full ocean of people who carry a

cell phone. As this Court has recognized, those phones

5 Jennifer

Valentino-DeVries, Tracking Phones, Google Is a

Dragnet for the Police, N.Y. Times (Apr. 13, 2019),

https://tinyurl.com/jvv7e5fk.

9

have become so “pervasive and insistent” that they

might seem “a feature of human anatomy.” Riley, 573

U.S. at 385. Most Americans “compulsively” carry

them constantly. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311. The

subset of people with cell phones who could have been

tracked for using the same app as Petitioner included

over half a billion Google users worldwide. Smith, 110

F.4th at 836. And numerous other apps likewise collect

location data.

As with the cell-site location information in

Carpenter, app-generated location history creates a

“deep repository of historical location information”

accessible “with just the click of a button” at

“practically no expense.” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 311312. And as in Carpenter, because this information is

collected for nearly all users at all times, “police need

not even know in advance whether they want to follow

a particular individual, or when”—they are effectively

following everyone all the time. Id. at 312. The result

is “near perfect surveillance,” akin to ankle monitors

on a significant portion of the population. Ibid.

That is why the Fifth Circuit drew a parallel

between general warrants and the first step of

Google’s geofence response protocol. That protocol

involved searching the entire Google database—all

592 million individual accounts—for users who were

at a particular location at a given moment, even

though law enforcement did not yet know, and may

never know, whom they were looking for. Smith, 110

F.4th at 836-837. Accordingly, the Fifth Circuit

correctly held that “geofence warrants fail” to pass

Fourth Amendment scrutiny, as “they allow law

enforcement to rummage through troves of location

10

data from hundreds of millions of Google users without

any description of the particular suspect or suspects to

be found.” Ibid.

Because geofence warrants are general dragnets

that search the private information of vast groups of

innocent people to generate, rather than respond to,

actual suspicion, they violate the principles laid down

in Carpenter and thus violate the Fourth Amendment.

II. Geofence Warrants Pose Unique Threats to

Religious Freedom and Associational

Rights.

Geofence warrants also threaten core First

Amendment freedoms by enabling surreptitious mass

intrusions into sensitive spaces like places of worship,

as happened here. When First Amendment rights are

implicated, warrants demand “the most scrupulous

exactitude.” Stanford, 379 U.S. at 485. But geofence

warrants lack that exactitude. Location data reveals

intimate details of First Amendment-protected

activities—faith affiliation; sacrament participation;

belief shifts via changing attendance or visiting a new

church; or involvement in recovery ministries, such as

for alcohol or pornography addictions. And with

“[a]wareness that the government may be watching”

comes “chill[ed] associational and expressive

freedoms.” United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 416

(2012) (Sotomayor, J., concurring). These violations

and their chilling effect provide an additional

compelling reason to reverse the Fourth Circuit here.

11

A.

Geofence warrants facilitate collateral

and targeted intrusions into sensitive

First Amendment spaces.

This Court has recognized that the Fourth

Amendment’s history is intimately connected with

suppression of First Amendment freedoms. Stanford,

379 U.S. at 482. The government’s use of “the power of

search and seizure as an adjunct to a system for the

suppression of objectionable publications is not new.

Historically the struggle for freedom of speech and

press in England was bound up with the issue of the

scope of the search and seizure power.” Marcus v.

Search Warrant, 367 U.S. 717, 724 (1961). The Bill of

Rights emerged against that background recognition

that unrestricted search power could “stifl[e] liberty of

expression.” Id. at 729. The First, Fourth, and Fifth

Amendments are thus “closely related” and safeguard

“not only privacy * * * but ‘conscience and human

dignity and freedom of expression as well.’” Stanford,

379 U.S. at 485 (citation omitted).

The indiscriminate, general search involved with

geofence warrants threatens all Americans in their

most intimate affairs. Drawing a geofence around a

church like the one here or any other religious venue;

a political party headquarters; or a newspaper or

printer sweeps in data on everyone—not just

unidentified criminals. And these intrusions occur

without the notice or outcry that would accompany

physical searches of those protected spaces to obtain

the same information.

This case illustrates the peril geofence warrants

pose to religious liberty. The geofence here included

12

Journey Christian Church, capturing the data of

anyone on the premises at that time who was carrying

a cellphone with Google Maps enabled.

And, for every case like Petitioner’s that reveals

the government’s surreptitious surveillance of

sensitive spaces, how many intrusions go unnoticed?

It is clear that this religious intrusion is not unique.

Another case, also on petition for certiorari before this

Court, similarly involved a geofence that encompassed

a church, including its parking lots and grounds. See

Wells v. State, 714 S.W.3d 614, 616 (Tex. Crim. App.

2025), cert. pet. docketed, No. 25-484 (U.S. Oct. 20,

2025). Given the ubiquity of sensitive First

Amendment spaces, the risk to them is inherent in

geofence warrants.

B.

In the digital age, First Amendment

sensitive spaces are at risk more than

ever.

Sensitive

spaces

like

churches

face

unprecedented risk today. Geofence warrants are just

the tip of the surveillance iceberg. The same rationales

for geofence warrants could easily be used to justify all

sorts of privacy encroachments through new

technologies. Such encroachments are likely to

continue sweeping in, or even targeting, First

Amendment-protected spaces.

1. Just a short distance from the geofence in

Petitioner’s case in Midlothian, Virginia, for example,

the FBI carried out surveillance against “radicaltraditionalist Catholics” in Richmond on the pretext

that they were potential violent extremists, as opposed

13

to simply perceived political opponents. 6 An FBI memo

proposed church infiltration for “threat mitigation,”

including interviewing priests and choir directors.

Recent oversight reveals broader distribution of the

FBI’s memo than originally claimed and broader antiCatholic bias throughout the FBI. 7

2. The FBI’s actions are especially worrisome

given law enforcement’s use of technologies that

mirror or exceed the intrusive and pervasive

surveillance that geofence warrants represent. Like

geofence warrants, tower dumps and automatic

license plate readers (ALPR) involve suspicionless,

pervasive data collection and retrospective searches.

Tower dumps are similar to geofence warrants, except

they involve cell phone companies instead of

technology companies, and they demand a list of all

users connecting to a specific cell tower during a

specified time instead of those users passing through

a geofence.

ALPR presents a far more intrusive practice at

the forefront of nationwide, AI-enabled surveillance

networks. One surveillance industry leader, Flock,

6 Nicholas

Reimann, FBI Director Subpoenaed By House GOP

Over Monitoring ‘Traditionalist’ Catholics, Forbes (Apr. 10, 2023,

3:25 PM), https://tinyurl.com/36n9rrsb; Tyler Arnold, FBI Used

Undercover Agent To Investigate Catholics, Says Weaponization

Committee Chairman, EWTN News (Apr. 11, 2023, 3:30 PM),

https://tinyurl.com/2b5ukuxy.

7 Chuck Grassley, Grassley Oversight Unveils Disturbing Extent

of FBI’s Anti-Catholic Bias (June 3, 2025), https://tinyurl.com/

2dmuauat; Staff of H. Comm. on the Judiciary, How the BidenWray FBI Manufactured a False Narrative of Catholic Americans

as Violent Extremists, 119th Cong. (2025), https://tinyurl.com/

529k8npx.

14

reportedly already has more than 80,000 surveillance

cameras across the United States. 8 And Flock is

seeking to expand its reach, including a recent ill-fated

partnership with Amazon’s Ring doorbells to merge

data from ALPR with neighborhood video footage. 9

The capabilities of this surveillance are exponentially

expanding, as seen when Ring unveiled its AI

integration to the American public during the 2026

Super Bowl. The bipartisan blowback to that unveiling

showed that Americans are unsettled with this level of

pervasive, dystopian surveillance. 10 Yet Flock

continues to expand and is not content to keep its eyes

on the streets. It is now also helping police

departments take to the skies by enhancing their

drone fleets with artificial intelligence. 11 And that

represents just one of many surveillance companies

8 Thomas Brewster, AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All

Crime In America, Forbes (Sep. 3, 2025), https://tinyurl.com/

3zaterup.

9 Amazon

quickly announced that it was cancelling its

partnership with Flock, noting that it would “continue to

carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they align with

[Amazon’s] standards for customer trust, safety and privacy.”

Omar Gallaga, Days After Its Super Bowl Ad, Ring Cancels Flock

Partnership Amid Surveillance Concerns, CNET (Feb. 13, 2026),

https://tinyurl.com/44w9ss2s; see also Proj. Priv. & Surveillance

Accountability, Inc., Flock Partners with Ring–“It’s a Warrantless

Day in the Neighborhood!” (Oct. 20, 2025), https://tinyurl.com/

57re9hfr.

10 Ahmad Austin Jr., ‘Dystopian’ Super Bowl Ad for Ring Camera

Gets Bipartisan Blowback: ‘Propaganda for Mass Surveillance,’

Mediaite (Feb. 9, 2026, 11:05 AM), https://tinyurl.com/4behp38v.

11 Proj.

Privacy & Surveillance Accountability, Inc., AI Drones

Sharpen the Security/Privacy Tradeoff of a Surveillance State

(Oct. 30, 2025), https://tinyurl.com/yc8x4kar.

15

seeking to place every ordinary Americans under the

government’s microscope.

3. So-called

“reverse

warrants”

involving

geofencing or ALPR, moreover, are not limited to

location data. The government has used other forms of

these “reverse search warrants” to extract other

private data, such as identifying anyone who has

searched for a specific phrase, Pennsylvania v. Kurtz,

348 A.3d 133, 138 (Pa. 2025) (government obtained list

of every person to Google a specific address where an

unsolved crime occurred), or forcing commercial

genealogy companies to allow access to their DNA

databases. 12 These broad uses of surveillance will

almost certainly lead to a variety of novel contexts,

such as tracking political protests, that implicate

Americans’ rights to free speech and freedom of

assembly.

All of these technologies separately pose severe

threats to First Amendment freedoms. But these

surveillance techniques do not exist in isolation. If this

Court is to preserve “that degree of privacy against

government that existed when the Fourth Amendment

was adopted,” Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 305 (citation

omitted), it must curb the use of suspicionless

surveillance, such as that inherent in geofence

warrants and the many technological searches that

will follow in their tracks.

12 Jocelyn Kaiser, A Judge Said Police Can Search the DNA of 1

Million Americans Without Their Consent. What’s Next? Science

(Nov. 7, 2019), https://tinyurl.com/28bxdrns.

16

CONCLUSION

Geofence

warrants

combine

previously

unimaginable and precise retrospective surveillance

with something mirroring a general warrant. This

Court should hold that they violate the Fourth

Amendment. The judgment of the Fourth Circuit

should be reversed.

Respectfully submitted,

GENE C. SCHAERR

Counsel of Record

ERIK S. JAFFE

JUSTIN A. MILLER

SCHAERR | JAFFE LLP

1717 K Street NW, Suite 900

Washington, DC 20006

Telephone: (202) 787-1060

gschaerr@schaerr-jaffe.com

Counsel for Amicus Curiae

MARCH 2, 2026