Okello Chatrie's cellphone gave him away.

Chatrie made off with $195,000 from the bank he robbed in suburban Richmond, Virginia, and eluded the police until they turned to a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them to collect the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene.

The geofence warrant police served on Google found that Chatrie's cellphone was among a handful of devices in the vicinity of the bank around the time it was robbed.

Now the Supreme Court will decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. It's the latest high court case that forces the justices to wrestle with how a constitutional provision ratified in 1791 applies to technology the nation's founders could not have contemplated in their wildest dreams.

Geofence warrants turn the usual way of pursuing suspects on its head. Typically, police identify a suspect and then obtain a warrant to search a home or a phone.

With geofence warrants, police do not have a suspect, only a location where a crime took place. They work in reverse to identify people who were in the area.

Prosecutors credit the warrants with helping crack cold cases and other crimes where surveillance cameras did not reveal suspects' faces or license plates.

Civil libertarians say that geofences amount to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could "unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches," law professors who study digital surveillance wrote the court.

Investigators used geofence warrants to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who attacked the Capitol in the riot on January 6, 2021, as well as in the search for the person who planted pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.

Police also credit these warrants with helping identify suspects in killings in several states, including California, Georgia and North Carolina.