Privacy and law enforcement clash as the Supreme Court wrestles with 'geofence' warrants

The U.S. Supreme Court Heather Diehl/ hide caption toggle caption Heather Diehl/ The U.S. Supreme Court seemed divided Monday on the question of geofencing, a relatively new and powerful tool that allows police to tap into giant tech databases in order to find out who was in the vicinity of a crime scene. In this case, the crime was an unsolved bank robbery that was ultimately solved by tapping into Google's database to determine the identities of people who were near the bank in the two hours before and after the heist. Although police obtained a warrant, it was for Google's database. The tech company pushed back hard to limit the number of cellphone owner identities it was willing to turn over, but the Trump administration maintained that because one-third of Google's customers voluntarily signed up for a feature called "location history," they have no right to privacy for that information. In oral arguments at the Supreme Court Monday, most of the justices aimed pointed questions at both sides, with the usual conservative-liberal alignments scrambled like an egg. …