First Court in California Suppresses Evidence from Overbroad Geofence Warrant

A California trial court has held a geofence warrant issued to the San Francisco Police Department violated the Fourth Amendment and California’s landmark electronic communications privacy law, CalECPA. The court suppressed evidence stemming from the warrant, becoming the first court in California to do so. EFF filed an amicus brief early on in the case, arguing geofence warrants are unconstitutional.

The case is People v. Dawes and involved a 2018 burglary in a residential neighborhood. Private surveillance cameras recorded the burglary, but the suspects were difficult to identify from the footage. Police didn’t have a suspect so they turned to a surveillance tool we’ve written quite a bit about—a geofence warrant.

Unlike traditional warrants for electronic records, a geofence warrant doesn’t start with a suspect or even an account; instead police request data on every device in a given geographic area during a designated time period, regardless of whether the device owner has any link at all to the crime under investigation. Google has said that for each warrant, it must search its entire database of users’ location history informat

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