Daniel O’Rourke

On November 23, 2018 at about 9:30 PM, Cobb County police officers within Atlanta, Georgia responded to a local distress call at 3400 Laurie Joe Drive. The caller was a very panicked 31 year old man by the name of Mitchell Jones Jr. Unfortunately, while the response time was quick, the police were ultimately too late to save him. The scene of the crime was brutal. Jones was found locked inside of his bedroom, stab wounds on his head, torso, arms and legs. Law enforcement tried to have an ambulance rush him to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead before he could even arrive. To make matters worse, the police had no leads at all. For a while afterwards the case was entirely cold. That is until six months later, when law enforcement successfully obtained a geo-fencing warrant.

A geo-fencing warrant is a product of recent technological innovation from Google known as their “Sensorvault.” You may not know it but Google tracks your location at all times. Even when your “Location History” setting is turned off, Google applications you download on your phone continuously collect data on your precise location. Over the past decade this information has been stored in Google’s Sensorvault database; at this point in time it contains the location information of hundreds of millions of phones. Beginning in 2016, United States law enforcement began to utilize this extremely thorough database to their advantage. They started to obtain new types of warrants, known as “geo-fencing” warrants. They would present these warrants to Google to request all of the information on devices within a certain area and timeframe, based on when and where a given crime was committed. This wasn’t very widely practiced until about a year ago. Since 2019, though, it has increased significantly. In fact, Google employees claim that during this past year they received up to 180 requests in a single week. And so, it was with the use of a geofencing warrant that Cobb County police officers obtained information on all devices near Mitchell Jones’s murder scene.

Using the location data that they obtained from Google, law enforcement was able to single in on one particular suspect: Dunte Lamont Holmes, a local 22 year old man. Police acted quickly and took Holmes into custody. Once they had him, they were able to match blood found at the scene to Holmes’s own. It wasn’t long after this that Holmes confessed to the police, and on January 6, 2020 he plead guilty to malice murder and aggravated assault. It had taken awhile, but the verdict was finally placed: Holmes would spend life in prison. Mitchell Jones’s family finally had closure.

The result of the case was a bona fide success. Law enforcement had caught their man and, as a result, a very dangerous individual was successfully taken off the streets. Using this example alone, it’s very easy to see the benefits that this technology presents for society. It has the capability to allow police officers to catch countless criminals, and also acts to disincentivize people from committing crimes in the first place. However, there has been backlash as many members of the public are incredibly frustrated with this usage of technology. Many have labeled law enforcement’s use of their personal location data as a violation of their privacy, and thus their fourth amendment rights.

Many peoples’ primary concerns are that this technique can, and has, resulted in the arrest of innocent people. Take the case of Phoenix, Arizona resident Jorge Molina for example. A normal warehouse worker, he was taken into custody after geolocation data placed him at a murder scene. However, after spending a week in jail, the police declared his innocence and released him. Shortly thereafter they arrested the guilty party, Molina’s step-father. The confusion had arisen as he had been driving his car with Molina’s phone in it at the time of the murder. Despite being released, the impact on Molina’s life was devastating. He had a traumatic experience in a maximum-security prison where law enforcement had kept him longer than necessary, despite mounting counterevidence. Not to mention his arrest will stay on his record forever. 

It’s easy to see why many people are concerned with their privacy being abused. Additionally, they have a good case against law enforcement using these warrants. Privacy law in the United States declares that police need a specific suspect to obtain a warrant; they can’t simply use a geo-fencing warrant to fish out of a pool of suspects and catch one. Yet, this hasn’t stopped judges from granting lenient warrants or Google from complying with them. On the other hand, it is hard to argue with murderers and criminals being arrested more effectively. Not to mention this technology has the capability to save taxpayers a ton of money by making law enforcement much more efficient. At the end of the day it comes down to differing ideologies. One side states “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Meanwhile, another side sees these warrants as the depletion of the United States’ constitutional protections.

References

Valentino-Devries, J. (2019). Google’s Sensorvault is a Boon For Law Enforcement. Here’s How it Works. The New York Times. [online]. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorvault-location-tracking.html

Dixon, K. (2020). Cops Use Google Location Data to Solve Fatal Cobb Stabbing. AJC. [online]. Available at https://www.ajc.com/news/local/cops-use-location-data-solve-fatal-cobb-stabbing/m8EoRZ78PnHICOz3PBhOgL/