US Supreme Court appears split over controversial use of ‘geofence’ search warrants
US Supreme Court appears split over controversial use of ‘geofence’ search warrants
美国最高法院对“地理围栏”搜查令的争议性使用意见分歧
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a landmark legal case that could redefine digital privacy rights for people across the United States. The case, Chatrie v. United States, centers on the government’s controversial use of so-called “geofence” search warrants. 周一，美国最高法院就一起可能重新定义全美数字隐私权的里程碑式案件听取了辩论。该案名为“查特里诉美国案”（Chatrie v. United States），核心在于政府对所谓“地理围栏”（geofence）搜查令的争议性使用。
Law enforcement and federal agents use these warrants to compel tech companies, like Google, to turn over information about which of its billions of users were in a certain place and time based on their phone’s location. By casting a wide net over a tech company’s stores of users’ location data, investigators can reverse-engineer who was at the scene of a crime, effectively allowing police to identify criminal suspects akin to finding a needle in a digital haystack. 执法部门和联邦探员利用这些搜查令，强制要求谷歌等科技公司提供信息，以确定其数十亿用户中，哪些人曾根据手机定位出现在特定地点和时间。通过在科技公司存储的用户位置数据中撒下“大网”，调查人员可以反向推导出谁曾在犯罪现场，这实际上让警方能够像在数字大海中捞针一样锁定犯罪嫌疑人。
But civil liberties advocates have long argued that geofence warrants are inherently overbroad and unconstitutional as they return information about people who are nearby yet have no connection to an alleged incident. In several cases over recent years, geofence warrants have ensnared innocent people who were coincidentally nearby and whose personal information was demanded anyway, been incorrectly filed to collect data far outside of their intended scope, and used to identify individuals who attended protests or other legal assembly. 但公民自由倡导者长期以来一直认为，地理围栏搜查令本质上范围过大且违宪，因为它们会返回那些身处附近但与涉嫌事件毫无关联的人员信息。近年来，在多起案件中，地理围栏搜查令不仅波及了恰好在附近的无辜民众，还被错误地用于收集超出预期范围的数据，甚至被用来识别参加抗议或其他合法集会的人员。
The use of geofence warrants has seen a surge in popularity among law enforcement circles over the last decade, with a New York Times investigation finding the practice first used by federal agents in 2016. Each year since 2018, federal agencies and police departments around the U.S. have filed thousands of geofence warrants, representing a significant proportion of legal demands received by tech companies like Google, which store vast banks of location data collected from user searches, maps, and Android devices. 过去十年间，地理围栏搜查令在执法圈内日益流行。《纽约时报》的一项调查发现，联邦探员于2016年首次使用了这种手段。自2018年以来，美国各地的联邦机构和警察部门每年都会提交数千份地理围栏搜查令，这在谷歌等科技公司收到的法律要求中占了很大比例，这些公司存储着从用户搜索、地图和安卓设备中收集的海量位置数据。
Chatrie is the first major Fourth Amendment case that the U.S. top court has considered this decade. The decision could decide whether geofence warrants are legal. Much of the case rests on whether people in the U.S. have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy over information collected by tech giants, like location data. It’s not yet clear how the nine justices of the Supreme Court will vote — a decision is expected later this year — or whether the court would outright order the stop to the controversial practice. But arguments heard before the court on Monday give some insight into how the justices might rule on the case. “查特里案”是美国最高法院本十年审理的首个重大第四修正案案件。该裁决可能决定地理围栏搜查令是否合法。案件很大程度上取决于美国民众对于科技巨头收集的信息（如位置数据）是否拥有“合理的隐私期待”。目前尚不清楚最高法院的九位大法官将如何投票（裁决预计将于今年晚些时候作出），也不清楚法院是否会直接下令停止这种争议性做法。但周一在法庭上听取的辩论，为大法官们可能如何裁决提供了一些线索。
“Search first and develop suspicions later“
“先搜查，后怀疑”
The case focuses on Okello Chatrie, a Virginia man convicted of a 2019 bank robbery. Police at the time saw a suspect on the bank’s security footage speaking on a cellphone. Investigators then served a “geofence” search warrant to Google, demanding that the company provide information about all of the phones that were located within a short radius of the bank and within an hour of the robbery. 该案聚焦于弗吉尼亚州男子奥凯洛·查特里（Okello Chatrie），他因2019年的一起银行抢劫案被定罪。当时，警方在银行监控录像中看到一名嫌疑人正在使用手机通话。随后，调查人员向谷歌发出了一份“地理围栏”搜查令，要求该公司提供在抢劫发生前后一小时内，位于银行附近短半径范围内的所有手机信息。
In practice, law enforcement are able to draw a shape on a map around a crime scene or another place of significance, and demand to sift through large amounts of location data from Google’s databases to pinpoint anyone who was there at a given point in time. In response to the geofence warrant, Google provided reams of anonymized location data belonging to its account holders who were located in the area at the time of the robbery, then investigators asked for more information about some of the accounts who were near the bank for several hours prior to the job. 在实践中，执法部门可以在地图上围绕犯罪现场或其他重要地点画出一个区域，并要求筛选谷歌数据库中的大量位置数据，以精确定位在特定时间点出现在该处的所有人。为了响应这份搜查令，谷歌提供了抢劫发生时位于该区域的账户持有人的大量匿名位置数据，随后调查人员又要求获取其中一些在案发前几小时就已靠近银行的账户的更多信息。
Police then received the names and associated information of three account holders — one of which they identified as Chatrie. Chatrie eventually pleaded guilty and received a sentence of more than 11 years in prison. But as his case progressed through the courts, his legal team argued that the evidence obtained through the geofence warrant, which allegedly linked him to the crime scene, shouldn’t have been used. 警方随后获得了三名账户持有人的姓名及相关信息，其中一人被确认为查特里。查特里最终认罪，被判处超过11年监禁。但随着案件在法院的审理，他的法律团队辩称，通过地理围栏搜查令获得的、据称将他与犯罪现场联系起来的证据，本不应被采纳。
A key point in Chatrie’s case invokes an argument that privacy advocates have often used to justify the unconstitutionality of geofence warrants. The geofence warrant “allowed the government to search first and develop suspicions later,” they argue, adding that it goes against the long-standing principles of the Fourth Amendment that puts guardrails in place to protect against unreasonable searches and seizures, including of people’s data. 查特里案的一个关键点引用了隐私倡导者经常用来证明地理围栏搜查令违宪的论点。他们认为，地理围栏搜查令“允许政府先搜查，后产生怀疑”，并补充说，这违背了第四修正案的长期原则，即设立护栏以防止不合理的搜查和扣押，包括对个人数据的搜查和扣押。
As the Supreme Court-watching site SCOTUSblog points out, one of the lower courts agreed that the geofence warrant had not established the prerequisite “probable cause” linking Chatrie to the bank robbery justifying the geofence warrant to begin with. The argument posed that the warrant was too general by not describing the specific account that contained the data investigators were after. But the court allowed the evidence to be used in the case against Chatrie anyway because it determined law enforcement acted in good faith in obtaining the warrant. 正如最高法院观察网站SCOTUSblog所指出的，下级法院之一曾同意，地理围栏搜查令并未建立将查特里与银行抢劫案联系起来的先决条件——“相当理由”（probable cause），从而无法证明该搜查令的合理性。辩论指出，该搜查令因未描述包含调查人员所需数据的特定账户而过于笼统。但法院最终还是允许在针对查特里的案件中使用这些证据，因为它认定执法部门在获取搜查令时是出于“善意”。
According to a blog post by civil liberties attorney Jennifer Stisa Granick, an amicus brief filed by a coalition of security researchers and technologists presented the court with the “most interesting and important” argument to help guide its eventual decision. The brief argues that this geofence warrant in Chatrie’s case was unconstitutional because it ordered Google to actively rifle through the data stored in the individual accounts of hundreds of millions of Google users for the information that police were looking for, a practice incompatible with the Fourth Amendment. 根据公民自由律师詹妮弗·斯蒂萨·格拉尼克（Jennifer Stisa Granick）的一篇博文，一个由安全研究人员和技术专家组成的联盟提交的法庭之友陈述书，向法院提出了“最有趣且最重要”的论点，以帮助指导其最终裁决。该陈述书认为，查特里案中的这份地理围栏搜查令是违宪的，因为它命令谷歌主动翻阅数亿谷歌用户个人账户中存储的数据，以寻找警方想要的信息，这种做法与第四修正案不相容。
The government, however, has largely contended that Chatrie “affirmatively opted to allow Google to collect, store, and use” his location data and that the warrant “simply directed Google to locate and turn over the necessary information.” The U.S. solicitor general, D. John Sauer, arguing for the government prior to Monday’s hearing, said that Chatrie’s “arguments seem to imply that no geofence warrant, of any sort, could ever be executed.” 然而，政府方面主要辩称，查特里“主动选择允许谷歌收集、存储和使用”其位置数据，而搜查令“只是指示谷歌定位并移交必要的信息”。在周一听证会前为政府辩护的美国副总检察长D·约翰·绍尔（D. John Sauer）表示，查特里的“论点似乎暗示，任何形式的地理围栏搜查令都无法执行。”