Geofence warrants: middle-path read

11,500 geofence warrants were served on Google in 2020 npr.org, and that scale framed the Supreme Court hearing in Chatrie v. United States, case 25-112 supremecourt.gov. The post-argument read is a middle-path price, not a regime change: AP heard a Court inclined to let police use geofence warrants to identify suspects apnews.com, while NBC’s take was that the justices at least looked ready to say a search occurred, so a warrant is required nbcnews.com. That is basically Carpenter carried into the Google era: the Court already said the government’s acquisition of cell-site records “was a search” under the Fourth Amendment supremecourt.gov, but left newer tools unresolved. For Alphabet, the beat is a narrow ruling that keeps geofence warrants alive with tighter particularity and warrant rules; the miss is language that makes the company’s database query itself more constitutionally suspect. A ruling that geofence demands are not a search at all would be the upside surprise for law enforcement; a broad constitutional bar would be the downside shock for the wider location-data stack.