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.
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves ruled such searches are unconstitutional because they violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure….