Alton Antrim v. Jared Hoy

In the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 25-1460 ALTON ANTRIM, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. JARED HOY, Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, Defendant-Appellee. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin No. 19-CV-396 — Brett H. Ludwig, Judge. ____________________ ARGUED DECEMBER 16, 2025 — DECIDED NOVEMBER 13, 2026 ____________________ Before SYKES, HAMILTON, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges. SYKES, Circuit Judge. Twice we have considered whether Wisconsin’s law imposing lifetime GPS monitoring on select categories of sex offenders is compatible with the Fourth Amendment. See WIS. STAT. § 301.48. Twice we have answered that question in the affirmative, including in an opinion at an early stage of this case. Braam v. Carr, 37 F.4th 1269, 1274–75 (7th Cir. 2022); see Belleau v. Wall, 811 F.3d 929, 937 (7th Cir. 2 No. 25-1460 2016). This appeal presents the same question a third time. Nothing has changed since our previous decisions, so our an- swer is the same. Wisconsin’s GPS monitoring program is rea- sonable under the Fourth Amendment because the state’s in- terest in monitoring repeat sex offenders outweighs the pri- vacy expectations of those subject to surveillance. We there- fore affirm the judgment in favor of Wisconsin’s Secretary of Corrections. I. Background Under Wisconsin law, some sex offenders are subject to lifetime GPS monitoring; they must wear a GPS tracking de- vice even after they have completed probationary supervi- sion. § 301.48. Offenders covered by section 301.48 include, for example, those who have committed a “level 1 child sex of- fense”—that is, sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 12 or sexual contact with a child under the age of 13 that causes “great bodily harm.” § 301.48(1)(cm), (2)(a)(1), (2), (3). Also included are those who have committed two or more sex offenses and for whom law enforcement has accordingly re- ceived a written “bulletin” notification. §§ 301.48(2)(a)(7), 301.46(2m)(am). (Bulletins give law enforcement an offender’s basic information, including his name, date of birth, address, and employer. § 301.46(2)(b).) For simplicity, we refer to of- fenders who fall into this latter category as “repeat offenders.” Alton Antrim is one such offender. He has twice been con- victed of first-degree sexual assault of a child: first in 1991 for molesting his five-year-old cousin and again in 1999 for re- peatedly molesting an eight-year-old girl. For his first convic- tion, Antrim served a sentence of six years of probation; for his second, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In addition to these predicate sexual-assault convictions, Antrim was No. 25-1460 3 convicted in 1982 of disorderly conduct for kissing and touch- ing a five-year-old girl. He has also committed several of- fenses for which he was neither arrested nor convicted. In- deed, Antrim admits to having assaulted eight children—all between the ages of five and ten. Antrim completed postconfinement supervision in October 2018, but section 301.48 requires that he wear a GPS tracking device for the rest of his life. The device currently in use is relatively small: It’s a few inches tall and about an inch each in width and depth, and it weighs just over six ounces. It attaches to a synthetic ankle bracelet and is essentially water- proof. The device’s battery life is approximately 40 hours, and it takes no more than two and a half hours to fully charge. Although the device may flash or vibrate to alert the user to a problem (such as a low battery or failed cellular connection), it does not emit or record sound. The GPS device transmits live, minute-by-minute location information to law enforcement, but the data is not analyzed contemporaneously. Every 24 hours or so, law enforcement reviews a sex offender’s location history to ensure that he has not visited a so-called “exclusion zone”—an area in which he “is prohibited from entering except for purposes of traveling through it.” § 301.48(1)(a). Exclusion zones typically encom- pass “areas where children congregate,” like schools, day- cares, and playgrounds. § 301.48(3)(c). They also include areas where an offender “has been prohibited” from traveling; a victim’s residence is a paradigmatic example. Id. Exclusion zones aside, offender location data is also examined when a sex crime has been reported. Depending on an offender’s lo- cation history, he may be either ruled out or identified as a suspect. 4 No. 25-1460 For a sex offender subject to the tracking program, the GPS monitoring obligation lasts for life, though after 20 years an offender may petition to terminate it. § 301.48(6). Following a criminal-history check and psychological examination, the petition may be granted if a judge determines “that lifetime tracking is no longer necessary to protect the public.” § 301.48(6)(d–h). The Department of Corrections, which maintains the GPS monitoring program, likewise may peti- tion for termination if an offender becomes “permanently physically incapacitated.” § 301.48(7). And if an offender moves out of state, the Department must “terminate the per- son’s tracking.” § 301.48(7m). Challenging this lifetime-monitoring requirement, Antrim and two other plaintiffs sued the Department Secretary under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. (The other plaintiffs have since been dis- missed from the case, so we say no more about them.) As rel- evant here, the complaint alleges that Wisconsin’s monitoring program violates the Fourth Amendment because it categori- cally subjects certain sex offenders to a lifelong unreasonable search. Antrim sought to represent a class of offenders who, like him, have committed two or more sex offenses and thus must submit to lifetime monitoring under section 301.48(2)(a)(7). Antrim moved for a preliminary injunction to bar the Secretary of Corrections from enforcing section 301.48(2)(a)(7) while his suit was pending. The district judge denied the mo- tion, and we affirmed. Braam, 37 F.4th 1269. Relying on our previous decision in Belleau v. Wall, which involved an analo- gous challenge to Wisconsin’s monitoring program, we ex- plained that warrantless GPS tracking of sex offenders “is rea- sonable under the Fourth Amendment if the government’s No. 25-1460 5 interest in monitoring these offenders outweighs the privacy expectations of those who must comply with the program.” Braam, 37 F.4th at 1273. Applying that standard to Wisconsin’s monitoring law, we concluded that Antrim was unlikely to prevail on the merits of his Fourth Amendment challenge. The state has a “strong interest” in monitoring repeat sex offend- ers for public-safety and deterrence purposes, we reasoned, and sex offenders have “diminished privacy expectations.” Id. at 1274–75. Back in the district court, the parties engaged in discovery, and Antrim moved to certify the proposed class. The judge partially granted the motion, certifying a class comprising anyone who is “subject to lifetime GPS monitoring” under section 301.48(2)(a)(7) because he has “been convicted of sex- ual offenses on two or more separate occasions.” 1 See § 301.46(2m)(am) (2023). By the parties’ estimate, approxi- mately 740 people fit the class definition. Both parties then moved for summary judgment. Predict- ably, the Secretary invoked our decision from the preliminary-injunction stage, arguing that we had conclu- sively resolved the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s GPS mon- itoring law as applied to repeat offenders. Antrim, for his part, contested the premises on which our previous decisions had relied. He insisted that the empirical evidence cut against (or, 1 After the judge certified the proposed class, the Wisconsin legislature amended the monitoring law to focus on an offender’s total number of convictions rather than the occasions of conviction. Today, a sex offender is subject to monitoring so long as he has at least two sex-offense convictions, “including convictions that were part of the same proceeding, occurred on the same date, or were included in the same criminal complaint.” WIS. STAT. § 301.46(2m)(am). The difference is largely immaterial for our pur- poses, and Antrim has not asked to revise the class definition. 6 No. 25-1460 at a minimum, did not support) the state’s asserted interests and that GPS monitoring imposes a significant and perma- nent loss of privacy. In his view, the fundamental problem with Wisconsin’s monitoring program was its failure to ac- count for individual risk: Because the program operates cate- gorically and for a fixed duration, he contended that it is over- broad and thus unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The district judge denied Antrim’s motion and granted the Secretary’s. Antrim’s arguments, the judge reasoned, boiled down to “thinly-veiled criticisms” of our prior decisions in Belleau and Braam. And it didn’t matter that section 301.48(2)(a)(7) imposes monitoring on some sex offenders with a low risk of reoffending. The judge reasoned that to ob- tain relief for the class as its representative, Antrim had to show that section 301.48(2)(a)(7) was unconstitutional as ap- plied to him—a repeat child molester—not as applied to some unidentified member of the class. Moreover, Antrim’s argu- ment sounded in the overbreadth doctrine, which as the judge explained, applies only to First Amendment claims. See Braam, 37 F.4th at 1276. The judge thus granted judgment to the Secretary, and this appeal followed. II. Discussion The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S. CONST. amend. IV. Its “basic purpose” is “to safeguard the pri- vacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions” by the government. Chatrie v. United States, 609 U.S. 605, 620 (2026) (quoting Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 303 (2018)). To that end, the Fourth Amendment generally re- quires that law enforcement procure a warrant before con- ducting a search; a warrantless search is presumptively No. 25-1460 7 unreasonable. But even a warrantless search may comport with the Fourth Amendment if it is reasonable under the “to- tality of the circumstances.” Samson v. California, 547 U.S. 843, 848 (2006) (quotation omitted). These circumstances account for, on the one hand, the degree to which the search “intrudes upon an individual’s privacy” and, on the other, the degree to which it “is needed for the promotion of legitimate govern- mental interests.” Id. (quotation omitted). There’s no question that warrantless monitoring “effects a Fourth Amendment search”; that’s precisely what the Supreme Court held in Grady v. North Carolina, which in- volved a Fourth Amendment challenge to North Carolina’s analogous lifetime monitoring program. 575 U.S. 306, 310 (2015) (per curiam). But the Court has not resolved whether such a search is reasonable. In Grady the Court left it to the state courts to assess the reasonableness of the monitoring program in the first instance. Id. Before proceeding, we pause to address a procedural point. Recall that the district judge refused to consider Antrim’s argument about the breadth of section 301.48(2)(a)(7), and specifically its categorical application to high- and low-risk repeat offenders alike, reasoning that Antrim could not invoke the characteristics of other class members to obtain relief for the class. The judge determined that Antrim was required to show that Wisconsin’s monitor- ing program was unconstitutional as applied to child molest- ers like him—in other words, repeat offenders whose prior sex crimes are especially heinous. Antrim contests that deci- sion, arguing that as the class representative, he was entitled to raise arguments on behalf of everyone in the class, includ- ing those with criminal records far less serious than his own. 8 No. 25-1460 To be sure, a plaintiff generally cannot secure relief by ar- guing that a statute has been or could be applied unconstitu- tionally to third parties not before the court. United States v. Skoien, 614 F.3d 638, 645 (7th Cir. 2010) (en banc). That’s true in the Fourth Amendment context too; as the Supreme Court has said, “Fourth Amendment rights are personal rights that may not be asserted vicariously.” Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 133 (1978). It appears that the judge had these third-party standing principles in mind when he limited Antrim to his own facts. But these principles don’t foreclose a named class repre- sentative from making arguments on behalf of a class. Quite the opposite; a class representative has a duty to advance the interests of other class members. See FED. R. CIV. P. 23(a)(4). After all, these class members are legally “before the court”: Even if not named, they will be “bound by and entitled to the benefits” of the court’s judgment as though they were them- selves parties to the suit. RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF JUDG- MENTS § 41(1)(e) (1982) (updated Oct. 2024). Accordingly, far from being barred from advancing arguments for everyone in the class, Antrim was obligated to do so. Further, to the extent that Antrim’s argument about the breadth of section 301.48(2)(a)(7) relies on facts shared by only a portion of the class (and not Antrim himself), that problem concerns the application of Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, not third-party standing. Rule 23 requires that there be “questions of law or fact common to the class,” FED R. Civ. P. 23(a)(2), and that the claims of the class repre- sentative be “typical” of those “of the class,” id. R. 23(a)(3). If these conditions aren’t satisfied, a plaintiff cannot represent a class; he must sue only in his own name and on his own No. 25-1460 9 behalf. Id. R. 23(a). And even if they are satisfied, the plaintiff may represent only those members of the class who suffered the same harms. But Antrim’s argument about the reach of section 301.48(2)(a)(7) and, by extension, its application to low-risk offenders is one that pertains to the entire class. As clarified here, Antrim’s challenge takes aim at the categorical nature of Wisconsin’s lifetime monitoring program. He argues that sec- tion 301.48(2)(a)(7) is facially unconstitutional—that is, it vio- lates the Fourth Amendment in every case—because it fails to account for individual circumstances. Rather, it applies on a categorical basis (to every repeat sex offender) and for a fixed amount of time (presumptively, for life). More to the point, Antrim concedes that warrantless mon- itoring doesn’t necessarily violate the Fourth Amendment; lifetime GPS tracking may be reasonable, he acknowledges, if imposed on repeat sex offenders who pose a significant risk of recidivism. In fact, he admits that this subgroup of high- risk offenders may even include himself. Still, Antrim con- tends that GPS monitoring may be imposed only after an in- dividualized risk assessment and only for as long as it takes for a heightened risk of recidivism to dissipate. So in the case of a low-risk offender, the state may be foreclosed from mon- itoring him at all. Understood this way, Antrim’s facial Fourth Amendment challenge is a nonstarter. A search is not unreasonable simply because it occurs pursuant to a categorical policy that lacks exceptions. We’ve already said as much. In fact, we’ve said so twice—first in Belleau and then again in Braam, our decision at the preliminary-injunction stage in this very case. Because 10 No. 25-1460 Antrim situates his arguments against the backdrop of both decisions, it’s worth describing them in some detail. Belleau involved a challenge to a neighboring provision of Wisconsin’s GPS monitoring law. Section 301.48(2)(b)(2) im- poses lifetime monitoring on any person who is discharged from civil commitment despite having once qualified as a sex- ually violent person. See WIS. STAT. § 980.09. That class in- cluded Michael Belleau, who challenged the monitoring law on Fourth Amendment grounds. Belleau, 811 F.3d at 931. We rejected Belleau’s challenge, explaining that the state has a clear interest in monitoring sex offenders who compul- sively commit sex crimes. Id. at 933. Belleau had tried to dis- tance himself from that characterization, emphasizing his ad- vanced age and relatively low risk of recidivism, which a psy- chologist had estimated at between 8 and 16%. Id. We found that argument unpersuasive. Id. (explaining that Belleau “can’t be thought just a harmless old guy”). Given the “seri- ous underreporting of sex crimes”—one study showed that as many as “86 percent of sex crimes against adolescents go un- reported”—these figures almost certainly underestimated Belleau’s actual risk of recidivism. Id. at 933–34 (citing U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF JUST. PROGRAMS, YOUTH VICTIMIZATION: PREVALENCE AND IMPLICATIONS 6 (April 2003)). And the assur- ance that Belleau had no greater than a 16% chance of reoffending was cold comfort. That’s one in six. Id. We concluded that Wisconsin’s monitoring program effec- tively advanced the state’s interest in deterring future sex crimes. Covered offenders are aware that they are being mon- itored and that they are almost certain “to be apprehended should a sex crime be reported at a time[] and a location” at which they are present. Id. at 935. That awareness helps deter No. 25-1460 11 recidivism because monitored offenders will think twice be- fore committing new sex crimes. Id. at 936. We then examined Belleau’s privacy interests. We ob- served that because Belleau was a registered sex offender, his criminal record and home address were already public. Id. at 935. And it wasn’t as if the Department of Corrections were spying on him or studying his every move; as we’ve already noted, the Department merely checks an offender’s location history to see whether he was “present at a place where a sex crime has been committed” or “hanging around school play- grounds” and other similar locations. Id. Simply put, Belleau suffered only a “slight” additional loss of privacy, so the bal- ance of interests weighed in the state’s favor. Id. at 935–36. We accordingly concluded that Wisconsin’s GPS monitoring pro- gram was reasonable. Id. at 937. That brings us to this case. At the pleading phase, Antrim insisted that he was entitled to a preliminary injunction be- cause his claim was distinguishable from Belleau’s. We disa- greed: “The only difference between the two cases is that Belleau concerned the subsection of the statute that imposes the monitoring requirement on sex offenders who have been discharged from civil commitment, whereas this case con- cerns the provision imposing the monitoring requirement on repeat sex offenders. That difference is immaterial.” Braam, 37 F.4th at 1274. With respect to the state’s interests, we determined that “Wisconsin has the same strong interest in monitoring both groups of sex offenders.” Id. Although Antrim had tried to differentiate the recidivism rates of repeat sex offenders (like him) from those of previously committed offenders (like Belleau), we explained that Wisconsin’s interest in deterring 12 No. 25-1460 recidivism applies equally to both groups. Id. at 1275. And more fundamentally, it is not our role to “second-guess” the state’s “legislative policy judgment by parsing the latest aca- demic studies on sex-offender recidivism.” Id. (quoting Vasquez v. Foxx, 895 F.3d 515, 525 (7th Cir. 2018)). We further concluded that both groups have equivalent privacy interests. Both repeat offenders and offenders who have been released from civil commitment appear on the state sex-offender registry, we explained, so their “diminished pri- vacy expectations” are materially identical. Id. Because Antrim had failed to distinguish Belleau, we held that he was not likely to succeed on the merits of his Fourth Amendment claim. And for that reason, he was not entitled to a preliminary injunction. Belleau and Braam obviously loom large here. Trying to find a way around them, Antrim contends that Belleau is dis- tinguishable and that Braam shouldn’t have relied on it. At the root of both arguments is an intuition about the relative dan- gerousness of once-committed sex offenders (the subgroup at issue in Belleau) and that of repeat sex offenders (the subgroup at issue here). As Antrim observes, the latter group encom- passes a wide range of offenders: anyone who has committed two or more sex offenses of any kind. Because at least some re- peat offenders are unlikely to recidivate, he argues that it isn’t reasonable for the state to monitor any of them—at least not without an individualized risk assessment. But this argument rests on a kind of doctrinal cross- pollination. As the district judge noted, Antrim’s challenge sounds in the overbreadth doctrine, a staple of First Amend- ment law that calls for a statute to be invalidated if it No. 25-1460 13 “prohibits a substantial amount of protected speech relative to its plainly legitimate sweep.” Smiley v. Jenner, 173 F.4th 865, 871 (7th Cir. 2026) (quoting United States v. Hansen, 599 U.S. 762, 769–70 (2023)). The doctrine lacks application outside the First Amendment context, however, and there isn’t an equiv- alent in Fourth Amendment law. As we explained in Braam, what matters under the Fourth Amendment is not how broadly a statute sweeps, but how reasonably it balances the competing personal and governmental interests at stake. 37 F.4th at 1276. The Supreme Court’s decision in Samson v. California says essentially the same thing. Samson involved a Fourth Amend- ment challenge to a California statute that authorized the search of a parolee “at any time of the day or night, with or without a search warrant and with or without cause.” 547 U.S. at 846 (quoting CAL. PENAL CODE § 3067(a) (2000)). As here, the challenger’s claim centered in large part on the categorical nature of California’s statute. Most other jurisdictions, the pe- titioner emphasized, had adopted parole-search policies that required “some level of suspicion.” Id. at 855. The Court was not persuaded. Not every supervisory search “require[s] a level of individualized suspicion”; the “touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness.” Id. at 855 & n.4 (emphasis added). And considering the totality of the circumstances—namely, a parolee’s “substantially di- minished expectation of privacy” and the state’s interest in re- ducing recidivism—California’s suspicionless-search statute was reasonable. Id. So too here. Repeat sex offenders have “diminished pri- vacy expectations,” and Wisconsin “has a strong public-safety interest in monitoring repeat sex offenders” to deter future 14 No. 25-1460 sex crimes. Braam, 37 F.4th at 1274–75. Balancing these inter- ests, Wisconsin’s GPS monitoring scheme is reasonable. The fact that it operates on a categorical basis, rather than case by case, doesn’t make it less so. See Samson, 547 U.S. at 855 & n.4. Trying to distinguish Samson (and cases like it), Antrim en- courages us to adopt a sliding-scale approach. He argues that the more intrusive a search is, the more individualized the government’s justification must be. Applying that logic here, he contends that lifetime GPS tracking is more invasive than a single parolee search, so Wisconsin’s categorical monitoring scheme violates the Fourth Amendment. Even if superficially appealing, there are several problems with this proposed sliding scale. Antrim hasn’t cited any au- thority to support it (nor have we found any ourselves). And it’s at odds with the Court’s more recent decision in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders, which echoed—and extended— Samson’s reasoning. At issue in Florence was a jail policy that required all incoming detainees to submit to a strip search. 566 U.S. 318, 323–34 (2012). Needless to say, these searches were extremely invasive; some detainees were instructed to “lift their genitals or cough in a squatting position.” Id. at 334. The petitioner challenged the policy on Fourth Amendment grounds, arguing that a strip search is reasonable only if there is “reason to suspect” that an inmate is “concealing a weapon, drugs, or other contraband.” Id. at 324, see id. at 334. The Court rejected the challenge, holding that the categor- ical strip-search policy struck “a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the [correctional] institu- tions.” Id. at 339. For starters, the jail officials had reasonably concluded that a case-by-case standard “would be unworka- ble. Id. at 334. Even “people arrested for minor offenses” may No. 25-1460 15 try “to smuggle prohibited items into [the] jail.” Id. at 335. Correctional officers, meanwhile, might have difficulty “clas- sify[ing] inmates by their current and prior offenses” before they are searched. Id. at 336. And practical problems aside, the Fourth Amendment simply doesn’t require the government to devise an individualized “framework of rules” to govern routine searches, even if invasive. Id. at 339. Antrim’s pro- posed sliding-scale approach is unsupported—and indeed, inconsistent with analogous precedent. Unable to distinguish Belleau and Braam, Antrim tries to undermine them by challenging our assessment of the state’s asserted interests. To start, he insists that the state has never used offender location data to solve a crime. But that fact, even if true, doesn’t undermine the state’s asserted interest in preventing such crimes in the first place. Belleau, 811 F.3d at 935. The whole point of Wisconsin’s monitoring program, as we said in Belleau, is to make an offender plainly aware that he will be apprehended “should a sex crime be reported” at a time and location “at which he is present” and, in turn, to de- ter him from reoffending. Id.; see Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union v. Von Raab, 489 U.S. 656, 675 n.3 (1989) (“When the Govern- ment’s interest lies in deterring highly hazardous conduct, a low incidence of such conduct, far from impugning the valid- ity of the scheme for implementing this interest, is more logi- cally viewed as a hallmark of success.”). Antrim also accuses the state of failing to study the efficacy of its GPS monitoring program. In Belleau, however, we sum- marized a study of California’s analogous surveillance pro- gram, which found that monitored parolees “were half as likely as traditional parolees to be arrested for or convicted of a new sex offense.” 811 F.3d at 936 (citing STEPHEN V. GIES, ET 16 No. 25-1460 AL., MONITORING HIGH-RISK SEX OFFENDERS WITH GPS TECH- NOLOGY: AN EVALUATION OF THE CALIFORNIA SUPERVISION PRO- GRAM 3–11, 3–13 (2012)). Antrim has given us “no reason to think that GPS monitoring of convicted child molesters in Wisconsin is any less efficacious.” Id. In fact, as the state notes, the rate of sex-offense recidivism has decreased in Wisconsin since the GPS monitoring program took effect. 2 Besides, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t require the state to quantify the precise impact of its monitoring program. As the Second Circuit has aptly observed, “deterrence need not be reduced to a quotient before a court may recognize a search program as effective.” MacWade v. Kelly, 460 F.3d 260, 274–75 (2d Cir. 2006). “Indeed, expressing the phenomena” of deter- rence in numeric terms is often impossible because “deter- rence by definition results in an absence of data.” Id. Moving from the efficacy of the monitoring program to its primary rationale, Antrim concedes that public safety and de- terrence are legitimate governmental interests. Even so, he ar- gues that sexual recidivism is relatively uncommon and that recidivism rates decline steadily over time. He specifically highlights offenders who have been convicted for possessing child pornography. Studies show, he says, that these offend- ers are unlikely to commit another pornography crime—and are even less likely to commit a future contact crime. As we have said before, it is not our role to “pars[e] the latest academic studies on sex-offender recidivism”—studies that can only try to account for the serious underreporting of 2 WIS. DEP’T OF CORR., SEX OFFENDER RECIDIVISM AFTER RELEASE FROM PRISON 10 (Sept. 2015), https://doc.wi.gov/dataresearch/recidivismreincar- ceration/sexualoffenderrecidivismreport.pdf. No. 25-1460 17 sex crimes—to second-guess the state’s policy judgment. Braam, 37 F.4th at 1275 (quotation omitted); United States v. Kebodeaux, 570 U.S. 387, 395–96 (2013) (deferring to Congress’s judgment, despite conflicting empirical evidence, that “safety needs” justified offender-registration rules). We’re especially hesitant to do so given that the state counters with statistics of its own. Simply put, the social-science research is far from conclusive. We thus see no basis to depart from our conclu- sion in Braam: Wisconsin “has a strong public-safety interest in monitoring repeat sex offenders for deterrence purposes.” 37 F.4th at 1275. Antrim also stresses the impact of GPS monitoring on sex offenders covered by section 301.48(a)(2)(7). Among other things, he points to the loss of privacy that results from con- tinuous surveillance, the hassle of charging the GPS device, the physical burden of wearing an ankle monitor (which he says causes discomfort and makes it impossible to wear tall boots), the implicit restrictions on travel to locations with spotty cell service, and the social stigma that accompanies be- ing marked a criminal. He also takes issue with the fact that an offender’s location history is subject to disclosure under Wisconsin’s open-records law. See WIS. STAT. § 19.35. We don’t doubt that wearing an ankle monitor is often in- convenient and sometimes embarrassing. But the Fourth Amendment protects property and privacy rights; it is not a bulwark against all inconveniences. And as our prior deci- sions have observed, sex offenders have diminished privacy expectations that endure even after they are released from custody. Braam, 37 F.4th at 1275; Belleau 811 F.3d at 935. Ac- cordingly, the burden associated with GPS monitoring is out- weighed by the “protection [of] potential victims of child 18 No. 25-1460 molestation.” Belleau, 811 F.3d at 934. That’s especially true given the alternatives that Antrim concedes are available to the state: The Wisconsin legislature could, he acknowledges, subject repeat sex offenders to lifelong terms of probationary supervision and, as a condition of which, require continuous location tracking. Or it could instruct Wisconsin judges to sen- tence every repeat sex offender to life in prison. If these alter- natives are valid, we struggle to see why Wisconsin’s current GPS monitoring program is not. That said, the possibility of public disclosure of an of- fender’s location history warrants separate mention. Deeming this concern a red herring, the Secretary claims that instances of public disclosure are few and far between; neither Antrim nor any other class member has been the subject of such a dis- closure. The Secretary also notes that Wisconsin’s open- records law incorporates a balancing test. Madison Teachers, Inc. v. Scott, 906 N.W.2d 436, 450 (Wis. 2018). As the custodian of each offender’s location records, he assures us that he could adopt a blanket policy against disclosure. Given this prospect, we need not say anything more about Wisconsin’s open-records law—at least not in this case. For now, it’s enough to say that a future challenge to the disclo- sure of an offender’s location data isn’t foreclosed by our de- cision here. Nor is a future challenge to section 301.48(2)(a)(7) as applied to any particular offender. All we resolve today is the specific issue presented by Antrim’s facial challenge—that is, whether the Fourth Amendment requires an No. 25-1460 19 individualized risk assessment anytime a state subjects a re- peat sex offender to GPS monitoring. We hold that it does not. 3 AFFIRMED 3 For this reason, we do not address the state’s alternative argument that GPS monitoring constitutes a valid “special needs” search. 20 No. 25-1460 HAMILTON, Circuit Judge, concurring. I join Judge Sykes’ opinion for the court. Since we affirmed the denial of a preliminary injunction in Bramm, however, we have evidence of a feature of the GPS program that raises serious Fourth Amendment problems. The state has taken the position that all location-tracking data gathered from the GPS monitoring of Antrim and other class members are public records subject to disclosure upon request to the general public. Such disclosures to the public seem hard to reconcile with the Fourth Amendment principles applied in Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603 (1999), especially in light of how much private information can be revealed by location tracking. This case does not require us to answer the Fourth Amendment question conclusively. Given the state’s position, however, the Fourth Amendment problem seems likely to arise soon, in state or federal courts or both. A quick sketch of the relevant law may help Wisconsin officials who might want to head off trouble by modifying their treatment of such record requests. 1 The Fourth Amendment allows reasonable searches for legitimate law enforcement purposes. Wilson teaches that the Fourth Amendment does not allow the use of such searches to satisfy the curiosity of the news media or an interested citizen. In Wilson, police were executing warrants in a private home. The officers invited a reporter and photographer to join them. In a later civil suit against the officers, the Supreme Court ultimately found that the officers were entitled to 1 I am not concerned here about disclosure of tracking information to other law enforcement agencies. Testimony here indicated that GPS monitoring data “can be shared freely among law enforcement entities within Wisconsin” and that such information has assisted law enforcement in investigating and solving crimes. Dkt. 89 at ¶ 6. No. 25-1460 21 qualified immunity. The Court reached that conclusion, however, only after the Justices agreed unanimously that the presence of the reporters or other third parties violated the Fourth Amendment: “We hold that it is a violation of the Fourth Amendment for police to bring members of the media or other third parties into a home during the execution of a warrant when the presence of the third parties in the home was not in aid of the execution of the warrant.” 526 U.S. at 614. The Wisconsin Open Records Act, Wis. Stat. § 19.31 et seq., allows any member of the public to request a wide range of records from state and local governments, for any reason or no reason. The Act presumes records are open to disclosure: “Except as otherwise provided by law, any requester has a right to inspect any record.” Wis. Stat. § 19.35(1)(a). I express no opinion here as to whether the geographic tracking data about these class members are covered by any statutory, common-law, or public-policy exceptions to the disclosure requirement. See generally Democratic Party of Wisconsin v. Wisconsin Dep’t of Justice, 372 Wis. 2d 460, 471, 888 N.W.2d 584, 589 (2016). The record here has conflicting accounts from the state about those questions, but it certainly does not show that disclosure would be prohibited as a matter of state law. Members of the plaintiff class thus face a risk that their geographic tracking information is available to any member of the public who might request it. Such disclosures could be incredibly invasive. That much has been recognized by the Supreme Court and other courts, even in legitimate law enforcement cases. For example, in holding that law enforcement needs a warrant to obtain historic cell phone location data, the Supreme Court explained: 22 No. 25-1460 Mapping a cell phone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts. As with GPS information, the time-stamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” [United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 415 (2012)], (opinion of Sotomayor, J.). These location records “hold for many Americans the ‘privacies of life.’” Riley [v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 403 (2014), quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630 (1886).] Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 311 (2018). Accord, United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544, 562 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups—and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”), aff’d, Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012); People v. Weaver, 12 N.Y.3d 433, 441–42 (2009) (“private nature” of GPS tracking data “takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on. What the technology yields and records with breathtaking quality and quantity is a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, but by easy inference, of our associations—political, No. 25-1460 23 religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few—and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits.”). A Fourth Amendment challenge to such disclosures to members of the public might wind up before the courts in a variety of ways. In light of the principles of Wilson, however, Wisconsin officials may wish to consider taking steps to avoid these potential Fourth Amendment violations in this otherwise permissible monitoring program.