Supreme Court Rules Fourth Amendment Covers Your Location Data

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s right to privacy when it comes to their phone location data.

The justices ruled 6–3 to send a Virginia bank robbery case back to the lower courts for review in light of its decision. In 2019, Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing a credit union after police saw him using his phone in the security camera footage of the bank. They then used a “geofence warrant,” which compels tech companies to provide law enforcement with data from all devices at a specific place and time, to identify Chatrie.

Geofence warrants are regularly used, and let the government demand location data and records from anyone near a crime scene without needing to identify an individual target.

Government lawyers argued that Chatrie did not have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, since he had willingly shared his location with Google.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for the majority, with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s liberals.

“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred, writing, “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s physical movements can provide “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

The ruling is a win for data privacy, and will make it harder for the federal government to access personal information stored in the cloud without getting a specific warrant.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed her conservative colleagues on Monday for making President Donald Trump more powerful than a king.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—a high court precedent that allowed Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

In a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Sotomayor warned that Trump had just become more powerful than the English monarch, whose Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”

“The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President,” Sotomayor wrote. “In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision was constitutional because the country’s founding Framers had “‘never intended’ to give the President ‘the complete set of powers’ that the English Crown held, let alone more.”

America will reach a historic milestone at the end of this week as it celebrates its semiquincentennial, but the people that comprise this storied nation have reportedly never felt so detached from its identity.

An AP-NORC poll published Monday (but conducted in April) found that American pride has dropped significantly over the last decade. Negativity surrounding the government has seeped into public perception of the core components of America’s story, such as its history, its foreign influence and impact, and the way the country’s democracy works.

Pride in American democracy has dropped 14 percentage points since 2017, when it was measured at 42 percent. It is now at 28 percent.

The survey also found that a majority of Americans are disillusioned with the American dream: They are not confident in their current financial situations, do not believe they can find a “good job” in the current market, do not believe they have the ability to purchase new homes if they want, and do not believe they’ll have enough money to retire when the day comes.

A Gallup poll, also published Monday, found that just 33 percent of U.S. adults were “extremely proud” to be an American. That’s the lowest rating since the polling group began asking the question in 2001, when 55 percent of the nation’s adult population answered similarly.

Another 20 percent of U.S. adults said they were “very proud” to be an American, indicating that just over half of the country feels a deep sense of pride in their national identity.

The fall-off is represented most extremely among self-identified Democrats, of whom just 14 percent said they were “extremely proud” to be an American in 2026. Right behind them were registered independents, 28 percent of whom offered the same response. Independents, according to Gallup’s data, have experienced a steady decline in national pride since 2004.

Meanwhile, 70 percent of Republicans said they were “extremely proud” to be an American when polled this year—a sharp uptick from when they were asked the question between 2020 and 2024.

President Donald Trump seems to be catching on that people aren’t impressed by his disastrous Great American State Fair.

“Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people, and everybody loving it?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday morning.

“Ask yourself this simple question, ‘DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?’ THE ANSWER IS NO!”

Since Trump’s pet project opened on the National Mall last week, it has been beset by a slate of issues, including technical difficulties and disappointing weather delays. Over the weekend, The New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson visited the festival in-person and confirmed it was a ghost town, marred by low energy and few attendees.

If you don’t believe us, check out posts from Trump’s allies:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted pictures from the president’s festival on Sunday. Barely anyone else seemed to be around.

Actor Dean Cain, a vocal supporter of Trump, also posted a picture from the top of Trump’s towering Ferris wheel, revealing thin crowds below.

Oh, and the food really is that overpriced.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled to scrap a key protection and cement President Donald Trump’s power over independent agencies.

In a 6–3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court found that the “for cause” removal provision for the Federal Trade Commission violated the separation of powers, allowing Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the FTC.

In the process, the high court voted to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 Supreme Court case that established Congress’s ability to limit the president’s ability to fire executive officials of independent federal agencies.

“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority ruling.

The decision grants the president broad firing powers across independent federal agencies. However, in a separate 5–4 decision on Monday, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Reserve was a different kind of entity, and blocked the removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

In a scathing dissent in the FTC case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor insisted that Congress could limit the reasons for removing the head of a federal agency.

“In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

The court previously issued a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines approving Trump’s emergency request to remove Slaughter from the FTC. Trump attempted to fire Slaughter in March, leading the commissioner to challenge the move, as presidents may only legally remove FTC commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In July, a federal court blocked Trump’s “unlawful” attempt to remove Slaughter, citing the Humphrey decision, which was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.