State v. Salter

Geofence warrants violate the U.S. Constitution and the New Jersey Constitution because they lack probable cause and are overbroad.

In 2022, a suspect committed an armed robbery of a gas station convenience store in Middlesex County and fled. After two weeks of investigation turned up no leads, the police applied for and sent a “geofence warrant” to Google to determine who may have been in the convenience store during the robbery. The geofence warrant required Google to search through its database of device location histories – covering in excess of 600 million users – to determine who may have been present within a specific boundary at a given time.

We filed an amicus brief in partnership with the national ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in support of the Office of the Public Defender’s challenge to the use of geofence searches as overbroad, unconstitutional searches unsupported by probable cause. Warrants like “geofence warrants” purportedly give the police the ability to search through entire databases of personal information without any specific target in mind. We argued that this kind of search is unconstitutional; no warrant, even one signed by a judge, should allow the police to go on a targetless “fishing expedition” that is likely to sweep up the private information of countless innocent people in the hopes of uncovering evidence of a single crime.