I spent 30 years in law enforcement. I know exactly what I’d do. And it scares me.
A man walks into a bank in Midlothian, Virginia.
Gun. Plan. $195,000. Gone.
The cameras caught everything except his face. What they did catch was a man on his cell phone. So the detective got a warrant and asked Google for the location data of every phone within 17.5 acres of that bank during the robbery.
Not a specific phone. Every phone.
Yours. Mine. The nurse on her lunch break. The guy at the ATM who had nothing to do with anything.
They cast a digital net over everyone, sorted out the criminal after the fact, and put him away for nearly 12 years.
Now his case is at the Supreme Court.
Dear readers, this week is different. I’m not here to give you answers. I’m here to give you my conflict and ask you to sit in it with me. Because this one is personal.
In 2018, I sat in a classroom at the Naval Postgraduate School and wrote my master’s thesis on exactly this. The title was “Privacy in Plain Sight: Fourth Amendment Considerations for the Collection, Retention, and Use of Data by Law Enforcement in Public Places.” I spent months studying smart city technology, geofencing, the Third-Party Doctrine, and what happens when a citizen voluntarily hands their location data to Google and a detective comes knocking.
My conclusion? The courts hadn’t caught up to the technology yet. I recommended Congress get ahead of it. And I wrote that when the moment finally arrived, the Supreme Court would have to decide. Congress did not take my advice. Shocking, I know. Apparently a cop moonlighting as a graduate student doesn’t carry the lobbying budget required to move legislation. And so, just as I predicted, here we are.
I just didn’t expect to be this conflicted when it did.
Because I need to tell you about a little boy from my city first.
His name is Timmothy Pitzen. He was six years old when he disappeared from Aurora, Illinois in May of 2011. His mother checked him out of kindergarten, took him to water parks for three days, then took her own life in a Rockford motel room. She left a note saying Timmothy was safe and would never be found.
He hasn’t been. He’d be 21 years old now.
This case has lived in my chest since it happened. We had cell phone records. We had security footage. We had a trail that went cold in rural Illinois and just stopped. His mother made her last calls near Sterling, Illinois. Her phone pinged cell towers in the area.
And then nothing.
I would have signed that warrant.
Not just for the bank robber. For Timmothy. For every case that went cold because the trail disappeared into someone’s pocket. We used license plate readers. Facial recognition. Every tool available to us. And I would have cast that net without blinking if it meant bringing that little boy home.
That’s the confession. Now here’s the conflict.
In every investigation the detectives worked on, the case led us to the tools. We had a lead, a suspect, a direction — and technology helped us close the gap. The Virginia detective flipped that equation. He had a video and a hunch and asked Google to hand over everyone. Cast the net first. Figure out who’s a criminal later.
That order of operations is what the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.
When I wrote my thesis, I studied every landmark case that brought us to this moment. From Katz v. United States in 1967 — where the Supreme Court ruled that a person in a public phone booth has a reasonable expectation of privacy — all the way to Carpenter v. United States in 2018, where the court finally said yes, the government needs a warrant to access your cell phone location data from a third party. Each case was technology forcing the law to catch up. Each one left new questions unanswered.
Geofence warrants were one of them. I wrote about it. I built hypothetical crime scenarios around it. I predicted this fight was coming.
I just didn’t predict I’d be sitting here seven years later unable to pick a side.
Because here’s what I wrote in my conclusion: law enforcement must continue to adhere to the parameters of the Fourth Amendment when seeking data on suspects, witnesses, and victims. The warrant requirement exists for a reason. And I meant it.
I still mean it.
But the Constitution doesn’t have a “but what about the little boy” exception. The warrant requirement exists precisely because we can’t trust that the government will only ever use its power on the obvious bad guy. Today it’s a bank robber on camera. Tomorrow it’s everyone who attended a political rally. A church. A protest.
The geofence doesn’t know the difference. It just knows who was there.
Justice Roberts raised that exact point in oral arguments last month. Same tool. Same warrant logic. Different target. And suddenly it’s not so clean anymore.
Here’s the thing about opting into your phone’s location services. You did it for convenience. For Google Maps. For Uber. For the weather app that knows you’re in Cape Coral and not Cleveland. You didn’t do it to give the government a window into your whereabouts. But somewhere in those terms and conditions you didn’t read, you handed your data to a third party. And that third party can be subpoenaed.
Your Uber Eats order knows where you were Thursday night. So does Google. So does your parking app.
I wrote about this in 2018 and concluded there is no such thing as privacy in plain sight. I stand by that. But I also wrote that law enforcement must embrace the revelation that data requires controls. That policy and legislation — not just court decisions — need to draw these lines.
Congress hasn’t drawn them. The courts are doing it instead. And now nine justices are being asked to decide how wide the net can go based on a case about a bank robbery, when the real implications stretch from missing children to political dissidents.
That’s the weight of this moment. And I feel it.
So here’s what I’m asking you to wrestle with — not to agree with me, but to find where you actually stand when it stops being abstract:
Are you willing to let a bank robber go free so your phone isn’t pinged?
Does your answer change for a murderer?
What about Timmothy?
The Supreme Court will issue its ruling before the end of summer. Before they do — I want you to think about where you land.
🖤 Onward and upward,
Kristen
