The Department of Homeland Security is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agents easy access to personal data and whereabouts of millions of people. WSJ investigative reporter Hannah Critchfield explains the latest on the technology, and how it’s being deployed. Plus, WSJ Supreme Court reporter James Romoser joins to break down the battle over whether geofence warrants are an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.
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[00:00:33] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, May 1st. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. On today's show, we're taking a look at two stories on the state of surveillance in 2026. Up first, this week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that's the latest test of how the Fourth Amendment, the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, applies in the digital age. But how they'll rule is anybody's guess.
[00:00:58] Listening to Monday's oral argument, it honestly became even tougher to make a prediction. Then, the Department of Homeland Security is deploying new high-tech tools to combat illegal immigration. Those tools are also giving federal agents access to the personal data and whereabouts of U.S. citizens. We're in this moment with the Department of Homeland Security where people who used to work there, people who have been impacted by this surveillance, civil rights experts,
[00:01:25] are sort of saying that it's testing the limits of what the department can and cannot do with that surveillance. But first, more than 500 million Google users have the platform's location history function enabled, self-included. Now, the data of one man is at the center of a key privacy case that was in front of the Supreme Court this week.
[00:01:53] The case was brought by Okello Chautry, who was serving a 12-year prison sentence for robbing a credit union near Richmond, Virginia, back in 2019. Authorities used a so-called geofence warrant to identify Chautry. The controversial warrants allow investigators to obtain a trove of cell phone location data and identify anyone who was near a specific place at a specific time. They've helped give law enforcement leads in cases, but they've also turned up thousands of innocent bystanders.
[00:02:22] Now, the Supreme Court is weighing if these warrants are a legitimate investigative tool or an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Joining us to break down the case is WSJ Supreme Court reporter James Ramoser. How do these warrants work in practice? The warrants can actually be as broad or narrow as the police want.
[00:02:43] They basically draw what's called a geofence area, and that can be any sort of geometric shape that encompasses a specific area on the earth. So in this case, actually, the area covered by the geofence, I think, was like about the size of a couple football fields. And so it didn't just cover the exact bank that was robbed, but it covered the immediate vicinity, including like a church, a health care facility, people's homes, that kind of thing. And then it's pinpointed in time, right?
[00:03:11] So the police will give a specific span of time when they believe the crime occurred, and they instruct the tech company, in this case Google, to identify all cell phones or other location sharing devices that were located or passed through that geographic area within that time interval. What are legal analysts watching for in this case? And how do they think that the court might rule? This is a really tough case to predict how the court is going to come out.
[00:03:41] And listening to Monday's oral argument, it honestly became even tougher to make a prediction. The justices have in the past really struggled with how to apply the Fourth Amendment in the digital age, because obviously the people who wrote the Fourth Amendment back in the 18th century never could have foreseen these types of technologies and these types of law enforcement tactics.
[00:04:04] And so at Monday's argument, we saw one justice in the conservative bloc, Neil Gorsuch, as well as some of the liberal justices, notably Sonia Sotomayor, both really pressing the government about the potential invasion of privacy that can arise from these warrants. We also heard various other justices really concerned that if they limit these types of geoffence warrants, they are going to hamstring a really important law enforcement tactic.
[00:04:34] How will the court's decision impact the average person who doesn't rob banks? Yeah, well, even if you don't commit any crimes, that doesn't necessarily mean that you want all of your data that is stored in your Google account or your Apple account to be able to be accessed by government authorities. Right. This case deals with historical location data.
[00:04:56] But some of the government's theories could apply just as well to your emails, your photos, all sorts of very intimate private information that you share with tech companies. But you might not necessarily think that you're giving the tech companies permission to share with the government, even if the government obtains a really broad warrant.
[00:05:19] You might not commit any crime, but that doesn't mean you want the government knowing what kind of health care facilities you might be visiting, what kind of therapy appointments you might have, whether you're visiting a political protest or a political organization, an AA meeting, an LGBT bar.
[00:05:36] Like there are all kinds of sensitive places that people visit that would be stored in their location histories if they turn that location sharing on, which most of us probably just do as a default without thinking much about it. But people might want to keep that information free from prying eyes, especially the prying eyes of government authorities. That was WSJ Supreme Court reporter James Ramoser. Do you have your location history enabled? Why or why not?
[00:06:06] If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. Coming up, social media activity, license plate numbers and biometric data. All of this information and more is being fed into a new high tech apparatus that gives federal agents the power to quickly find people across the country. That's after the break.
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[00:06:50] We're invested in community, supporting military veterans and their families, disaster relief and economic empowerment. Because we're proud to be invested in America. See how at USPMI.com. The Department of Homeland Security is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
[00:07:17] And much of that money is going to a newly expanded domestic surveillance system. With high tech tools built to locate, track and deport people living illegally in the United States. This system allows thousands of federal agents nationwide to peruse a trove of data belonging to more than 300 million people, including American citizens. Civil rights groups say that some of these tactics may violate the Constitution. The Department says it's operating in full accordance with the law.
[00:07:46] WSJ investigative reporter Hannah Critchfield joins us now to explain how this technology is being used. And if there's anything you can do to prevent yourself from being tracked. Hannah, can you start by telling us a little bit about the surveillance technology and how federal agents are using it? My colleague Shane Shiflett and I found the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on different types of surveillance technology and tools.
[00:08:11] And how that's being used in the field, it means federal agents have easy access to home and workplace addresses of millions of people, including American citizens. Their flight history can be pulled up. Images that might be taken at TSA might be used. Social media comments that are publicly available. Facial recognition.
[00:08:34] Agents now have the ability to hold their phone up to your face with an app and pull up your information to see whether you're a United States citizen or not. Another app that agents have essentially allows them to search for people who might be undocumented by their name or by their date of birth or by zip code. And you can see likely targets almost on like a heat map that'll pop up on your phone with little pins of possible undocumented people in the area.
[00:09:02] It's a pretty extensive surveillance apparatus. Your story uses 9-11 as a reference point for government surveillance. Can you walk us through the technology that was available then and how that compares to what federal agents are working with now? The Department of Homeland Security in its modern iteration was started in response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks here in New York. And at the time, the intelligence community certainly had and has been criticized for its widespread use of surveillance.
[00:09:31] But one thing that is new in this moment is just the amount of commercial vendors collecting data about us through the rise of the Internet. And then you've also got artificial intelligence, which is a really big component of the current surveillance apparatus that we're seeing with the Department of Homeland Security. And in general, the federal government has talked about how artificial intelligence is a major initiative point for them.
[00:10:00] They want AI to be used in every aspect of the federal government, including immigration enforcement and other actions from the Department of Homeland Security. So our reporting found that through the use of private contractors, the government is using AI to rapidly aggregate information. But they're also using it to scan social media 24 hours a day to look for potential threats to federal officers.
[00:10:28] But it just expands the reach of what can be reviewed and at what pace in a way that I don't think anyone could have predicted in 2001. So it kind of sounds like it's a combination of two things. One, we are just generating more data as we've all become more online. Yes. And with the advent of AI, the government now has more powerful tools with which to process that data. Exactly. So which companies are benefiting from this initiative? It's some old and new players.
[00:10:57] We found that Palantir has really benefited from the increased spending on surveillance tools, data. But then you're also going to see companies like Deloitte, which provides a variety of different services to the federal government, but also emerged as a partner in immigration enforcement in recent months. You also wrote about how this technology is being deployed against U.S. citizens in some cases.
[00:11:21] We found that in Maine, a handful of residents said that they had federal immigration agents show up at their houses after they observed immigration actions in their community. Maybe they were following the agents in their cars, which is in a public place, generally legal, to see where the immigration agents were headed next. And the immigration agents drove to the individual person's house. They said something like, we know you live right here. This is a warning.
[00:11:49] And it's this idea of perhaps using a license plate reader or the scanning of a person's face in the field and then using that to show up at a U.S. citizen's home. People we spoke to and people we read about in public court filings, it just sort of defied their expectations for how their information is being used.
[00:12:14] You know, we as citizens and as residents of the United States submit a lot of our data to a lot of private companies and to the federal government as well. You know, like we're in this moment with the Department of Homeland Security where people who used to work there, people who have been impacted by this surveillance, civil rights experts are sort of saying that it's testing the limits of what the department can and cannot do with that surveillance.
[00:12:41] So is there anything that I can do to limit being tracked? There are certain settings you can set up if you have an Android or an iPhone. But I would say for a lot of these things, this is information that we already surrendered to the federal government and may just already be in these types of tools as long as the federal government continues to use them. That was WSJ investigative reporter Hannah Critchfield. And that's it for Tech News Briefing.
[00:13:10] If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Danny Lewis. I'm your host, Imani Moise. Additional support this week from Melanie Roy. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. And Chris Zinsley is the deputy editor of audio for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.