2026-04-27T09:00:51.398Z / 美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）
作者：约翰·弗里茨
3小时前发布
发布时间：2026年4月27日，美国东部时间上午5:00
几年前，弗吉尼亚州一起银行抢劫案陷入僵局时，当地警方求助于谷歌。
执法部门向这家科技巨头申请了“地理围栏搜查令”，要求该公司解析数百万用户的位置数据，以找出案发时手机定位在银行300米范围内的少数嫌疑人。
警方凭借这些数据破了案，但也引发了一场宪法性质疑，如今该案已提交至最高法院。
大法官们将于本周一审议，这类针对科技公司而非个别嫌疑人的大规模搜查令是否符合第四修正案关于禁止不合理搜查的规定。
当前美国人将海量数据存储在网上，最高法院的判决既可能让执法部门更易破案，也可能让当局获取大量个人信息。
“这事关重大，”明尼苏达大学法学院院长、数据隐私法专家威廉·麦格弗兰说道，“所涉及的问题适用于任何追踪你位置的数字技术，而这类技术比比皆是。”
在弗吉尼亚州这起案件中，警方称奥科洛·查特里在2019年递出一张纸条，要求银行柜员“交出所有现金”，并威胁“至少给10万美元，否则没人能安然无恙，你的家人也别想好过”。起初警方无法确认嫌疑人，但监控录像显示嫌疑人在抢劫前使用过手机。警方正是据此向谷歌索要位置数据。
警方确认查特里的身份后，执行了联邦搜查令，在他的卧室里发现了“抢劫式勒索纸条”、近10万美元现金和一把9毫米口径手枪。警方称查特里对抢劫供认不讳，最终被判处11年以上监禁。
查特里在附带条件下认罪，但保留了就地理围栏搜查令提起上诉的权利。位于里士满的美国第四巡回上诉法院驳回了他的诉求，裁定该搜查令不属于第四修正案意义上的“搜查”。法院的理由是，既然人们允许科技公司收集数据，那么这种行为通常是自愿的。这一论点正是为搜查令辩护的美国司法部所 heavily 依赖的核心论据。
美国副检察长D.约翰·佐尔向最高法院表示，查特里“未采取任何措施保护自己的位置信息不被泄露，比如暂停已启用的位置历史记录功能，或在作案时调整、关闭手机，甚至不用手机”。
但查特里的律师认为，这一逻辑不适用于他的案件，部分原因是2018年最高法院的一项先例。在“卡彭特诉美国案”中，意见分歧的法院裁定，执法部门在获取手机基站数据以确认嫌疑人行踪前，通常需要确立合理依据。查特里的律师表示，如果当局获取手机基站数据需要搜查令，那么获取可靠得多的位置数据，自然也必须获得搜查令。
查特里案件中涉及的位置数据，每两分钟就能将一个人的位置精准定位在3米范围内。
“这项技术或许新颖，但它带来的宪法问题并不新鲜，”查特里的律师亚当·尤尼科夫斯基向最高法院表示，“第四修正案源于建国者们对通用搜查令和协助状的憎恶——这类文书允许政府先搜查，再事后构建嫌疑理由。”
在“卡彭特案”的判决中，保守派首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨与当时的自由派四票多数站在一起。三名现任保守派大法官克拉伦斯·托马斯、塞缪尔·阿利托和尼尔·戈萨奇持反对意见。
自那以后，又有三名大法官加入最高法院：保守派布雷特·卡瓦诺、艾米·科尼·巴雷特，以及自由派凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊。
难以预测的联盟
地理围栏搜查令在下级法院中引发了分歧，而第四修正案相关案件在最高法院往往会形成难以预测的联盟——该院正试图将1791年批准的宪法条文与GPS追踪器、人工智能聊天记录、门铃摄像头等现代科技相协调。
1967年的一项重要判决中，最高法院裁定联邦特工在窃听付费电话前必须获得搜查令。该判决确立了一项原则：即便没有 physical intrusion，宪法也保护人们免受搜查。由德怀特·D·艾森豪威尔总统提名的约翰·马歇尔·哈伦二世大法官在该判决的协同意见中提出，只要政府侵犯了“合理的隐私期待”，就构成搜查。
数十年来，这一理念一直是最高法院第四修正案判例法的主导原则。
1979年，最高法院裁定，警方从电话公司获取嫌疑人住宅的拨号记录器数据——该设备记录拨打的电话号码——并未违反第四修正案。当时法院的理由是，拨打的号码属于“商业记录”，嫌疑人向电话公司自愿披露了所拨号码，因此对这些号码不享有合理的隐私期待。
近年来，2012年的一项一致裁决裁定，警方未经搜查令不得在嫌疑人车辆上安装GPS追踪器。该判决得到了现任最高法院五名大法官的支持，其重要意义在于重振了“宪法保护人们的财产免受不合理搜查”的理念。查特里辩称，计算机数据是一种财产形式，是第四修正案中明确提及的“文件和物品”的现代类比。
收到绝大多数此类搜查令的谷歌已更改政策，调整了数据存储方式。正因如此，联邦政府最初曾辩称，该案实际上已无实际意义。
但麦格弗兰表示，此案涉及的原则仍可能波及金融交易、照片、电子邮件以及大量被上传至在线存储的其他各类信息。
“这或许不会成为执法部门的一站式便捷渠道，”他说，“但这仍是他们很可能会使用的一项技术。”
Supreme Court to debate whether police may seek sweeping cellphone location data in investigations
2026-04-27T09:00:51.398Z / CNN
By John Fritze
3 hr ago
PUBLISHED Apr 27, 2026, 5:00 AM ET
The sun rises above a facade of the US Supreme Court building on March 31.
Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images
When an investigation into a Virginia bank robbery went cold a few years back, local police turned to Google.
Authorities served the tech giant with a “geofence warrant,” which required the company to parse location data on millions of people to find a handful whose cellphones pegged them within 300 meters of the bank at the time of the robbery.
With the data in hand, police solved their case. They also triggered a constitutional challenge that is now before the Supreme Court.
The justices will debate Monday whether the sweeping warrants, which are directed at tech companies rather than individual suspects, are consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches.
At a time when Americans store vast amounts of data online, the court’s decision could make it easier for law enforcement to solve crimes but also expose troves of personal information to authorities.
“It’s huge,” said William McGeveran, dean of the University of Minnesota Law School and an expert in data privacy law. “The issues involved apply to any of the digital technology that is tracking your location, which is a lot of things.”
In Virginia, police say Okello Chatrie passed a note urging a bank teller in 2019 to “hand over all the cash” and demanded “at least 100k and nobody will get hurt and your family will be set free.” Initially, police were unable to identify a suspect, but officers noticed on security cameras that the suspect was using his phone before the robbery. That’s when they sought the location data from Google.
After police identified Chatrie, authorities executed federal search warrants and found “robbery-style demand notes” in his bedroom, nearly $100,000 in cash and a 9 mm pistol. Police say Chatrie confessed to the robbery and was ultimately sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea but reserved the right to appeal over the geofence warrant. The Richmond-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him, holding that the warrant didn’t constitute a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes. After all, the court reasoned that when people allow tech companies to collect data they generally do so voluntarily. It is an argument that the Justice Department, which is defending the warrants, relies on heavily.
Chatrie “took no steps to protect his location from disclosure, such as pausing the Location History feature he had enabled or adjusting, deactivating, or forgoing his cellphone during his crime,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court.
But Chatrie’s attorneys argue that the logic doesn’t apply to his case, in part because of a 2018 Supreme Court precedent. In that case, Carpenter v. US, a divided court ruled that law enforcement generally needs to establish probable cause before accessing cellphone tower data to identify the movements of suspects. If authorities need a warrant to get cellphone tower data, Chatrie’s attorneys said, then surely they also must obtain one to get data that is far more reliable.
The location data at issue in Chatrie’s case can identify a person’s location within 3 meters every two minutes.
“The technology may be novel, but the constitutional problem it presents is not,” Chatrie’s lawyer, Adam Unikowsky, told the Supreme Court. “The Fourth Amendment was born of the Founders’ revulsion for general warrants and writs of assistance — instruments that allowed the government to search first and develop suspicions later.”
In the Carpenter decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, was in the majority with the then-four-justice liberal wing. Three current conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — were in dissent.
Three justices have joined the bench since then, conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Unpredictable alliances
Geofence warrants have divided lower courts and Fourth Amendment cases can make for unpredictable alliances on the Supreme Court, which is attempting to square language that was ratified in 1791 with GPS trackers, chats with artificial intelligence and doorbell cameras.
In an important 1967 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment required federal agents to obtain a warrant before tapping a payphone. The decision established the idea that the Constitution protects against searches even absent a physical intrusion. A concurring opinion in that decision from Justice John Marshall Harlan II, nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, suggested that searches occur whenever the government infringes on a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
That idea has been a dominant force in the court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for decades.
In 1979, the court ruled that police did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they obtained from the phone company a pen register — a device that recorded phone numbers dialed — from a suspect’s home. In that case, the court reasoned that the dialed numbers were “business records” and that a suspect did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy to them because he had voluntarily disclosed the number he dialed to the phone company.
More recently, in 2012, a unanimous court held that police could not place a GPS tracker on a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant. That decision, which was joined by five members of the current court, was important because it revived the idea that the Constitution protects people’s property from an unreasonable search. Computer data, Chatrie argues, is a form of a property — a modern analogue of the “papers and effects” specifically cited in the Fourth Amendment.
Google, which had received the majority of the warrants, changed its policy to shift how the data is stored. Because of that, the federal government had initially argued that the case was effectively moot.
But, McGeveran said, the principles at stake could nevertheless have as far reach as financial transactions, photos, emails and an incalculable amount of other information makes its way to online storage.
“It might not be the same kind of one-stop shopping for law enforcement,” he said, “but it’s still a technology that they’re very likely to use.”
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