The Midnight Magnet: United States v. Jones & The Digital Fourth Amendment

In the quarter-century since September 11, American policing transformed into a high-tech surveillance powerhouse—from military thermal imagers and GPS beacons to geofences and AI-powered cameras. But every time law enforcement rushes into an unregulated technological frontier, the Supreme Court has had to pull the reins. Today, as Flock license plate cameras map whole cities and police drones take to the skies, has technology finally outpaced the Constitution? In this episode of reWandt, we trace the post-9/11 evolution of law enforcement technology and the continuous constitutional tug-of-war between police power and civil liberties. We walk through the five landmark decisions where the Supreme Court intervened to protect citizens: Kyllo (thermal imaging), Jones (GPS tracking), Jardines (curtilage), Riley (cell phones), and Carpenter (cell-site location tracking). Then, we confront the two newest unregulated frontiers: Flock Safety's nationwide AI automated license plate reader (ALPR) cloud network and autonomous police drone fleets. Can 1980s public-road and airplane flyover cases justify a 2026 digital panopticon? Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #FourthAmendment #SurveillanceState --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*

Can police draw a virtual circle on a map and demand that tech companies identify every person inside? Following an unsolved 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, detectives drew a 150-meter circular geofence covering 17.5 acres—sweeping up a church, residential homes, and public streets—and served a reverse location warrant on Google's proprietary Sensorvault database. Instead of investigating a suspect to search their property, the warrant inverted the Constitution by investigating a geographic territory to unmask anyone who stepped inside. In this episode of reWandt, we examine the landmark 2026 Supreme Court decision Chatrie v. United States. Explore how Justice Elena Kagan and a 6-3 high court held that accessing an individual's Google Location History via a geofence warrant constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, why the third-party doctrine cannot justify digital dragnet policing, and how this historic ruling protects over a billion smartphone users from modern general warrants in everyday life. Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #GeofenceWarrant #DigitalPrivacy --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*

Can the government track your physical movements backward in time for months without a search warrant? In 2011, federal prosecutors investigating a series of retail armed robberies in Detroit obtained 127 days of historical cell-site location records for Timothy Carpenter—harvesting 12,898 distinct location points without a Fourth Amendment search warrant. Instead, the government relied on Section 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act, arguing that under the traditional Third-Party Doctrine, cell phone users voluntarily disclose their location to wireless carriers simply by keeping a handset powered on. In this episode of reWandt, we unpack the landmark 2018 Supreme Court ruling Carpenter v. United States (585 U.S. 296). Explore how Chief Justice John Roberts and the high court rejected the mechanical application of 1970s landline telephone precedents to modern smartphones, why continuous cell-site tracking functions as a digital time machine, and how the Court established a bright-line warrant requirement that protects 300 million Americans from retrospective mass surveillance in everyday modern life. Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #DigitalPrivacy #FourthAmendment --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*