(José Niño, Headline USA) Despite promising to protect civil liberties such as free speech, the Trump administration is gearing up to expand the government’s domestic surveillance powers.
This past Tuesday, prosecutors at the Justice Department filed a motion to appeal a federal judge’s order that ruled so-called “tower dumps” are unconstitutional.
Tower dumps refer to a technique law enforcement uses to collect cell phone data from all devices that are connected to a specific cell tower during a specific time period. This method allows law enforcement agencies to gather information on hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of cell phones in a given area, often without requiring a warrant.
This issue stems from a recent case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, where U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Harris declined to issue search warrants for tower dumps on Feb. 21, 2025.
According to a recent report by judicial news website Court Watch, Harris ruled that this technique violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Originally, the FBI submitted four sealed search warrants for the tower dump’s data. This move was part of a probe into an unnamed violent gang implicated in several shootings and cases of car theft.
On multiple occasions, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Harris refused to authorize the search warrants. Judge Harris stood his ground even after the DOJ published a memorandum to make their position clear. The DOJ also held a conference call with Judge Harris to touch on some of his concerns, to little avail.
Judge Harris’ order was significant because it was the first case where a judge ruled against law enforcement agencies’ use of tower dumps. The order in question broadened the scope of an August ruling in a federal appeals court, which determined the use of a geofence warrant — wherein law enforcement submits a request to Google to provide the location data of phones at a particular location — was unconstitutional.
In his original ruling, Harris wrote, “The Government is essentially asking the Court to allow it access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle…The Fourth Amendment does not permit law enforcement to rummage through troves of data and themselves determine the existence of probable cause to support the seizure of that data.”
The prosecutors wrote in their motion, in anticipation of an appeal, that “the matter before this Court involves a rather novel issue that has not been directly or specifically addressed by this Court or the Fifth Circuit.”
The Justice Department’s decision to appeal this ruling underscores the ongoing debate between law enforcement’s operational needs and privacy rights in the digital era. This case could establish a new precedent for how law enforcement agencies obtain and use cell tower data in criminal investigations.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
