Two hundred and seventy years ago, the Colony of Massachusetts Bay passed legislation to ban general warrants. It will surprise few readers to learn that the British government ignored this.
Frequently used by British officers, general warrants are very broad authorizations for searches and seizures. Rather than specifying a particular person or place, they allowed expansive searches with no clear target. Unlike police using probable cause justifications to search an individual’s property for evidence of a crime, general warrants are meant for sweeping searches of many people or places that may or may not be involved in any illegal activities. They are often carried out with the goal of uncovering and crushing dissent.
A few decades and a Revolution later, these experiences gave life to the Bill of Rights, which declares that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Fast forward to August 2026. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi heard and rejected a case in which law enforcement sought approval for multiple “tower dump warrants.”
Judge Reeves declined to reverse a lower court’s decision to deny the request, ruling tower dump warrants to be unconstitutional and calling them general warrants.
“Tower dumps” refer to the practice of collecting all data from all devices that connected with a cell tower within a certain time period. A common practice in law enforcement, they are used to identify everyone within a certain radius of a crime. As cell phones connect to towers several times a minute even when not actively receiving or sending messages, each tower dump can collect personal communications of tens of thousands (or sometimes hundreds of thousands) of people (multiplied by the number of towers searched in a given investigation). Usually none of those people will ever know their information was searched.
In this dragnet, the innocent are caught up alongside the guilty. None of these persons are “particularly describe[ed].” For the vast majority, there is no probable cause or any trace of suspicion.
In the Mississippi case at hand, Jackson police appealed a previous court decision denying them tower dump warrants.
In considering the case, Judge Reeves reflected “Our Founders envisioned the Amendment as an iron-clad protection against the ‘reviled ‘general warrants’ and ‘writs of assistance’ of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity.’”
The court found it “hard to imagine that any tower dump warrant application can satisfy the particularity requirement.” Due to the absence of both the probable cause the particularity explicitly required by the Fourth Amendment, the court held that “tower dumps are per se unconstitutional general warrants.”
A major point of dispute was the assertion that these data collections did not constitute a “search.” If not a search, they would not be subject to Fourth Amendment protections. Judge Reeves rejected this view, citing the recent Chatrie decision:
“The Court, once again, held that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cellular data. But the Court went a step further and clarified that ‘police invade that expectation [of privacy in cellular information], and thus conduct a search, when they acquire that information, even though for only a limited period of time and even though via a third-party tech company.’ The Chatrie Court, thus, filled an important gap in Carpenter by expressly determining that the temporal aspect of a search has no bearing on whether or not a search occurred. … Put simply, a search is search, regardless of its duration.”
The future of this decision remains unclear. But mass electronic surveillance is facing a long overdue reckoning. As Judge Reeves noted, “digital surveillance can also provide the government with unfettered access into individuals’ lives. Such intrusions would have been unthinkable to those 55 men gathered in Philadelphia in 1787.”
