Hello, this is RJ Deakin, reading the Supreme Court of United States opinion syllabus in Shatry versus United States. Surtiari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Argued April 27, 2026, and decided June 29, 2026. On May 20th, 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Local police officers learned from witness interviews and surveillance footage that the robber had approached the credit union from a corner of an adjacent church while appearing to talk on a cell phone, but they could not find out anything more. And the robber remained at large. On June 14th, the police officers applied to a Virginia magistrate for a geofense warrant directed to Google, which would require Google to hand over data about the cell phones located within a 150-meter radius of the credit union, the so-called geofense, near the time of the crime. The application described the cell phone location data Google collects through a service called Location History, which records the location of a user's cell phone every two minutes or so. The application also explained how that cell phone location data could help identify the robber, possible accomplices, or additional witnesses. The warrant described a three-step process that the police would follow. At step one, Google would produce anonymized data, uh location data for all cell phones within the geofense 30 minutes before to 30 minutes after the robbery. At step two, officers would attempt to narrow the list, and Google would provide additional anonymized data for that narrowed list, consisting of cell phone locations both inside and outside the geofense during a two-hour period surrounding the robbery. And at step three, officers would further narrow the list and Google would turn over identifying information, including names and phone numbers for users on the final list. The magistrate issued the warrant, and through this process, Google ultimately produced three cell phone users identifying information, including petitioner Okilo Shatri, whose location data showed that he entered the geofense about 10 minutes before the robbery and headed towards a residential area immediately after leaving the bank. Following further police work, a federal grand jury charged Shatri with robbery and related firearms offenses, and he moved to suppress the information the police obtained from Google. According to Shatri, the officers had acquired that data through a Fourth Amendment search, and the warrant ostensibly authorizing that search was invalid. The district court found that the geofense warrant plainly violates the rights enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, but denied the motion based on good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. The divided panel of the Fourth Circuit affirmed on different reasoning, holding that no search occurred because Shatri did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours worth of location history data voluntarily exposed to Google. The Fourth Circuit granted rehearing and banc and affirmed in a one sentence per curium, with the court dividing evenly on whether a Fourth Amendment search had occurred. This court granted certiari solely on the question whether the police violated the Fourth Amendment in obtaining Shatri's location data. The decision below is reversed and is vacated and remanded. Sorry, decision below is vacated and remanded, and Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the court. Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Shatri's location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell phone location information. The Fourth Amendment protects individuals' reasonable expectations of privacy, and governmental intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search. That's Carpenter versus United States. The amendment's basic purpose is to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by government officials, and it was designed to place obstacles in the way of a two-permeating police surveillance. That's United States versus DiRE 332 U.S. 581. In Carpenter, this court held that accessing cell site location information, CSLI, constitutes a Fourth Amendment search because individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. The court reasoned that CSLI provides a detailed and encyclopedic portrait of a person's whereabouts, and with that, an intimate window into that person's life. Because people compulsively carry their cell phones all the time, the court explained, a cell phone tracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner, and thus faithfully follows him, not only through public through affairs, but into private private residences, doctor's offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales. The court observed that the newfound tracking capacity that CSLI gives the police runs against everyone, not just those under investigation, and travels back in time, making possible a form of surveillance that would have been unknown prior to the digital age. Carpenter accordingly held that allowing government access to cell site records contravenes expectations of privacy. Everything Carpenter relied on to find that law enforcement officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they accessed CSLI records applies as well or better to the police's accessing of location history data. First, location history provides an even more fine-tuned picture of a person's movements, pinpointing location within around 20 meters rather than within sectors of one eighth to four square miles. It records location every two minutes or so for a daily average of 720 chartings rather than one hundred and one. And it can estimate elevation to reveal which floor of a building a phone is on. Second, location history allows police to reconstruct retrospectively and with no real effort people's comings and goings in any area, enabling tireless and absolute surveillance of any number of people in any number of places. That's citing Carpenter at three hundred twelve. And third, location history implicates personal privacy interests even more than CSLI, because location history is more the cell phone user's own data. Most cell phone users have no awareness of a CSLI records and would never try to retrieve them. By contrast, Google users regularly employ location history as a personal journal. In that way, location history resembles other private materials, for example, emails, documents, photographs, or calendars, that even if stored on Google servers, a user reasonably views as his own and expects to be shielded from the inquisitive eyes of the government. The government's argument that accessing only a short amount of cell phone location information does not count as a Fourth Amendment search fails. Even short-term monitoring can provide a wealth of detail about a person's familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. That's citing United States versus Jones 565 US 400. And this court has never understood Fourth Amendment protections as kicking in only once an intrusion goes too far. Pennsylvania Coal Company versus Mahoon 260 U.S. 393. Where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies regardless of the quality or quantity of information the government obtains. That's Kylo versus United States. That approach makes all the more sense when, as with location, history, law enforcement officials can select the time-limited set of materials they want from an all-encompassing database. The government argues that the so-called third-party doctrine precludes Shetri from invoking the Fourth Amendment's protections. The idea is that in authorizing Google to collect, retain, and use his location information, Shetri lost his legitimate expectation of privacy, and therefore his right to complain of a search. But Carpenter refused to apply the third party doctrine to CSLI, and no good reason exists to reach a different result for location history. In Carpenter, the court rejected application of the third party doctrine to CSLI because such information is qualitatively different from telephone numbers and bank records. It is incomparably revealing and is not truly shared as one normally understands the term. Given that cell phones are indispensable to participation in modern society, both differentiating features apply equally or better to location history, which is even more revealing than CSLI and is not truly shared in the normal sense of wanting a third party to see or use it. The exposure of that information to Google is merely what happens when a user avails himself of one of the services on his cell phone. The government's argument that generating location history, unlike producing CSLI, is a voluntary choice is meritless. That argument ignores how and why Google users turn on location history. Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not work correctly otherwise, while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users' location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government. More generally, an app by app feature by feature method of granting Fourth Amendment protection misapprehends the nature of modern cell phone use, where nearly everything requires some kind of affirmative act beyond powering up a given app or service. The government wishes to disconnect the activities people do on their cell phones from the mere act of carrying a turned-on cell phone, the thing that generates CSLI, with only the latter receiving assured Fourth Amendment protection. But the point of carrying smartphones is to use what is on them, as Carpenter said, to use the apps and services they provide. Accordingly, a cell phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties, which then can be freely passed on to the government, just by doing the ordinary thing cell phone users do. The conclusion that a Fourth Amendment search occurred does not resolve the case because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only searches that are unreasonable. When law enforcement officials undertake a search to discover evidence of a crime, the reasonableness standard generally requires that they seek a warrant from a neutral and detached magistrate. That's Johnson versus United States 333 U.S. 10. Who may issue a warrant only when probable cause is properly established, and the scope of the authorized search is set out with particularity. That's Kentucky versus King, 563 U.S. 452. The warrant issued here, as described earlier, was an uncommon multi-step one, and the parties have contested the legality of each stage of the search process it authorized. The Fourth Circuit did not address the questions that unusual warrant raises. Because this is a court of review, not of first view, see Cutter versus Wilkinson, the court leaves it up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether at each step of the search process the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment's requirements of particularity and probable cause. The decision below is vacated and remanded. Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the court, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson joined. Justice Jackson filed a concurring opinion, in which Justice Sotomayor joined. Justice Gorsuch filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. Justice Alito filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice uh Justice Thomas joined as to part one, and in which Justice Barrett joined as to Parts two B, two C one and two C two. Justice Barrett filed a dissenting opinion. Thank you for listening.