From https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...
Additional details:
> The information that Google provided to law enforcement officials came in three tranches. First, Google gave law enforcement officials a list of the 19 accounts (but without the names attached to those accounts) linked to devices that were within 150 meters of the bank during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Second, based on that list of 19 accounts, the government asked for additional information about nine accounts that were in the area during a two-hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for, and received, the names and information associated with three accounts – one of which was Chatrie’s.
> Relying on the location data, law enforcement officials obtained a warrant to search two residences linked to Chatrie, where they found almost $100,000 of the stolen cash, a gun, and demand notes.
> Prosecutors charged Chatrie with bank robbery. He asked the trial judge to bar prosecutors from using the evidence obtained as a result of the geofence warrant at his trial, arguing that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.
> A federal district judge agreed that the warrant in Chatrie’s case did not have the kind of probable cause and specificity that the Fourth Amendment requires. However, she nonetheless allowed the prosecutors to use the evidence, reasoning that even if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
Link to ruling:
I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.
I believe this is similar to how they nabbed the Washington State University murderer. The feds compelled Amazon to give them all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders and were able to correlate it to other devices their suspect's phone had been visible to.
> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.
You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect and force you spend a bunch of money defending yourself. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...
Hopefully rulings like this make that scenario a little less likely to happen, but it doesn't stop it entirely, it just means that the police need to spend 15 minutes to get a rubber-stamped warrant before they turn everyone within a few miles of crime into a suspect.
>You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect
Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?
A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure.
A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.
Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.
one of the more fun things I learned during criminal court in Texas is that the absence of forensic evidence cannot exonerate an individual. The prosecutor and the judge covered that despite not having any forensic evidence, the jury would still be expected to be able to convict the defendant. If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.
They are trying to avoid a situation where you end up with one juror who watches a lot of CSI and insists that they need forensic evidence to convict, despite having a dozen eye-witnesses. If a juror cannot imagine a circumstance where the evidence could be beyond a reasonable doubt based on non-forensic evidence, then they aren't suitable to be a juror.
For example, if you're sitting in your living room with a bunch of other people, many of whom know each other, and two people start fighting, you are all witnessing a crime and you can also all identify the two people fighting. It would be ridiculous to require DNA evidence in that situation.
Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?
As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?
I think you're missing the slippery slope that this goes down. The criminal charges were way too low, given the alleged actions. The state admitted it had absolutely no forensic evidence. The judge was perfectly fine with this and selecting a jury that was OK convicting in this circumstance. This pretty quickly pretty us down a path of "you're guilty of at least one crime since you've been indicted, maybe a more serious one if we have some evidence".
Five (or fifty-five) people giving unambiguous eyewitness testimony that clearly identified the defendant and the crime he committed, with them all keeping their stories consistent under hostile cross-examination has exactly zero forensic evidence... but if you, as a juror, found all of that persuasive, it sounds like it should be enough to convict.
I mean in this case it would also have helped not to have $100k in cash from a bank robbery laying around.
There's no indication that this guy had to hire a lawyer or actually do anything. The same location data that put him near the scene/time of the crime would also absolve him. I guess it's sad that he felt the need to pay for a lawyer.
Google told him that he would have to go to court to block the release of his identifying data to the police. He was not told what the request was about. At that time, he could only guess that it was related to the break in that happened near his home almost a year ago.
A lawyer at that point was a very good idea. Especially since all it takes is an arrest to cause you to lose your job and make it very difficult to get another one. It wasn't until after his lawyer got involved that the state attorney’s office contacted the police and told them this guy wasn't a likely suspect.
He would have used the same data Google already gave the police to win his case in court anyway, but it's a very good thing he managed to avoid having to deal with any of that before things went any farther.
Source for this? As I recall, his phone was off when he committed the murders. In fact, they used the evidence that it had been turned off just for the duration of the murders (with some padding) against him.
If you're going to commit a crime, don't suddenly turn off your phone if you don't have a history of doing so!
Hopeful they used the MAC address to find the phone, then tracked the phone itself, because an IMEI and ICCID are pretty difficult to clone, but a Bluetooth MAC address is trivially easy.
Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe this data is persisted, unless they tore open the device to extract logs.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/amazon-releases-echo-dat...
This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.
This smells like an urban myth.
I don't think it's implausible that an Echo would have an internal list of trusted Bluetooth devices and their last date of connectivity.
The original claim is:
> all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders
which is just not how this stuff works. I'd believe it if, say, debug-level logs were being recorded locally. But that would be an incredibly stupid way to burn through your flash storage.
But that's besides the point. A record of the last date of connectivity for trusted devices is an entirely different thing.
I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. I'm not interested in speculation.
Amazon used Echo devices for all kinds of invasive purposes other than advertised. Tracking the bluetooth identifiers of nearby devices is small potatoes compared to other things they've done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
One of those purposes was to explicity use Echos for tracking purposes:
> Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/amazon-partners-with-tile-to...
My car shows "last seen" on its Bluetooth connections. The murderer in this case was an invited friend; it's hardly implausible he's connected to Bluetooth there.
> I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place.
That they obtained access to the Echo's internals via Amazon is evidence. It sounds like you want proof of a very particular bit of data being in it, which I'd guess the FBI etc. aren't going to provide here.
I don't think that is ever admitted into the public record or presented to a jury. An expert reviews it and prevents the conclusions. In the even that you had the knowledge to review it yourself, you're excluded from the jury as jurors aren't allowed to question means and methods.
It is a little confusing, they ruled that the search was not legitimate, but this didn’t end up helping the defendant? I’m definitely missing an important nuance here but I’m not sure what it is…
The judge doesn't care if the law was violated in collecting evidence.
Maybe this particular judge didn't for whatever reasoning, but judges definitely prevent a prosecutor from introducing evidence based on how it was collected. This is why concepts like "fruit of poisonous tree" and "parallel construction" exist.
> [E]ven if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
How is this even remotely a possibility?
It just means they were completely transparent with the court when getting the data, and believed themselves it was lawful.
What’s hard to believe about that? They clearly put some effort into minimising the collateral privacy intrusions.
In retrospect, the part I quoted is very unclear for what I intended. I should have added more.
What's hard to believe is the data is apparently still allowed in the case. Like... how?
Because the police got a warrant, exactly as this decision now says was required.
And there's something called the "good-faith exception" for unreasonable warrants: If you get a warrant where it's required (or in this case, where the government tried to argue it wasn't!), and a magistrate grants that warrant, it's a legal warrant so long as all participants were acting in good faith, believing their actions to be legal. Even if a court later finds that the warrant should not have been issued for one reason or another.
This is why Alito was grouchy during oral arguments and in his opinion that the Court took the case in the first place. The police got a warrant, acting in good faith. It allowed them to identify the criminal, who was later convicted. It wasn't clear that any decision by the court on the warrant requirement would have anything but an advisory effect, and SCOTUS doesn't do advisory opinions by longstanding tradition.
Because there are way too many existing precedents where "acting in good faith" was sufficient to overcome the Fruit of the poison tree doctrine.
This court doesn’t care about precedent.