Digital investigations make classification harder because a small request can reveal a large amount of information. Records held by a company are not automatically outside the Fourth Amendment. In Chatrie v. United States (2026), police used a geofence process to obtain Google Location History associated with devices near a bank robbery. The Supreme Court held that acquiring Chatrie's location information was a search because a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in cell-phone location data; the short, two-hour period did not eliminate that protection. The Court left the lower court to decide whether each stage of the geofence warrant satisfied probable cause and particularity, and it did not decide the separate suppression question. That division is a model for exam reasoning. First ask whether acquisition of the data was a search. Then test the warrant or exception. Only after finding a constitutional violation should you ask whether the exclusionary rule bars a particular item of evidence. Technology does not create a free-standing constitutional test. The government act, information obtained, privacy or property interest, justification, and requested remedy still do the work.

Video lesson: Search and Seizure: Crash Course Government and Politics #27