A federal judge in Mississippi ruled on Aug. 5 that so-called tower dump warrants are unconstitutional.
A tower dump warrant covers all devices connected to specified cell towers during a given time frame. It generally yields large volumes of data, the vast majority of which belongs to people with no connection to a crime.
It is different from a geofence warrant, in which law enforcement asks a company that stores precise location data for devices that were inside a geographical boundary—called a geofence—during a specific time period.
Specifically, the judge found that such warrants are general warrants, meaning they didn’t describe the place to be searched with sufficient specificity. Such warrants are unconstitutional per se, meaning they are unconstitutional by their very nature, without needing a case-by-case examination of the specific facts of the case, the judge held.
General warrants, which are related to British writs of assistance, were a major grievance of Americans in the colonial period. General warrants were used to carry out wide-ranging, discretionary searches of homes and businesses, but did not specify what authorities were looking for or where they expected to find it.
The Fourth Amendment states that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause … particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
With the information obtained under the warrants in the case, the federal government argued it would be able “to identify all potential suspects,” Reeves wrote.
“Even so, law enforcement would also have access to the cellular records of countless individuals, the vast majority of whom were merely passing by a location at the ‘wrong’ time.”
“Such intrusions would have been unthinkable to those 55 men gathered in Philadelphia in 1787,” he wrote, referring to the convention at which the U.S. Constitution was drafted.
A magistrate judge, who handles preliminary criminal proceedings, previously denied the warrant applications.
Reeves denied the federal government’s motion seeking to overturn the magistrate judge’s earlier denial of the February and June 2025 tower dump warrant applications. The government sought the warrants as part of an investigation into gang-related violent crimes that took place over a 14-month period in Jackson, Mississippi.
“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the 6–3 ruling.
The high court did not hold that geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional, finding instead that obtaining the data constitutes a search and triggers constitutional scrutiny.
Reeves cited Chatrie in his decision, as well as United States v. Smith, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruling from 2024 on digital surveillance technologies. In Smith, the appeals court held that geofence warrants are “unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice for comment. No reply was received by publication time.
