On February 21, 2025, a federal district court in Mississippi issued an order finding that law enforcement’s cell tower dumps violated the Fourth Amendment. The district court based this ruling on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recent decision regarding the constitutionality of geofence warrants in United States v. Smith, 110 F.4th 817 (5th Cir. 2024).
What is a cell tower dump? A dump is what happens when a phone company provides law enforcement with the data on all devices that connected with a specific tower during a specific period of time. Using information from tower dumps, law enforcement can get a rough idea of where a person was during a time period if their phone connects with specific towers.
Alabama does not have any cases on tower dumps, but most courts to have considered tower dumps have held that they are not searches within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment—meaning law enforcement doesn’t need a warrant. Recent cases from the Nebraska and Delaware Supreme Courts have explained why.
So why has this district court gone the other way? That is because of the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Smith which held that all geofence warrants are unconstitutional. A geofence has some similarities to a tower dump, but is based on GPS. Law enforcement asks a company to provide GPS data for all accounts with location information turned on within a specific area for a specific timeframe. This was usually done through Google because of the popularity of Google email accounts. The easiest way to understand geofence warrants is to imagine law enforcement drawing a circle around an area and requesting information from Google for every account that shows up in that circle during a particular timeframe. Although Google has stopped storing the location information used for these type of warrants, other companies have similar capabilities.
Only a few courts have addressed geofence warrants and the typical analysis concerns whether acquiring this information constitutes a search within the Fourth Amendment. The warrants are, by their very nature, broad and targeted at anyone who happens to be in the area—rather than targeted at a known individual—and the area and time parameters are drawn arbitrarily by law enforcement. These are the type of issues that are usually considered in reviewing search warrants—which, constitutionally, require particularity. The Fifth Circuit’s decision in Smith held that all search warrants are general warrants that violate the Fourth Amendment because they authorize the search of every device with an account within the area and because the company has to search its entire database—hundreds of millions of accounts in the case of Google—to determine which accounts were in the area.
The district court interpreted Smith’s reasoning as applying equally to tower dumps as to geofence warrants. Because the Mississippi district court is within the Fifth Circuit, the district court was required to apply Smith if it determined that tower dumps were the equivalent of geofence warrants—which it did.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that currently the Fifth Circuit is an outlier in this type of analysis. There are very few appellate court decisions addressing geofence warrants—none of which take the same view as the Fifth Circuit—and virtually all courts have said that tower dumps are not Fourth Amendment searches. So unless other circuits adopt the reasoning of the Fifth Circuit in future geofence or tower dump cases, this result will likely be confined to the Fifth Circuit.
