A Federal Court Just Struck Down Dragnet Cell Searches. Flock Is Next.

What the court decided

On August 5, 2026, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi ruled that “tower dump” warrants are per se unconstitutional — unconstitutional by their very nature, no matter how the government writes them. A tower dump orders a phone carrier to hand over every device that connected to a cell tower during a chosen window — which, in a city, means the phone of everyone who drove past, worked nearby, or lived across the street. The case came out of a federal gang investigation in Jackson; a magistrate judge had twice refused the applications, and Judge Reeves upheld those denials.

His reasoning is the part that matters for us. A tower dump, he held, is a general warrant — the blanket, suspicionless search the Founders banned — because it does not describe the place to be searched with any real specificity. As he put it: “The government cannot have access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.”

What a “reverse” search is — and why it’s different

An ordinary warrant starts with a suspect and asks for that person’s records. A reverse search runs the other way: it starts with a place or a time and sweeps in everyone, then works backward to find a suspect among the innocent. Three flavors have reached the courts:

• Tower dumps — every phone near a tower in a time window (the Reeves case).
• Geofence warrants — every phone inside a drawn map area, pulled from a company’s location data.
• Reverse keyword searches — everyone who searched a given term.

Each begins by searching the many to find the one. That inversion — suspect everyone first — is what courts keep calling a general warrant.

This ruling is part of a line, not a lone opinion

Reeves didn’t write on a blank slate. He leaned on a decision the Supreme Court handed down six weeks earlier: Chatrie v. United States (June 29, 2026), where the Court held 6–3 that pulling a person’s location history is a Fourth Amendment search — even though a private company holds it. Behind Chatrie stand Carpenter v. United States (2018), on cell-site location, and United States v. Jones (2012), on GPS tracking. The through-line across all of them is aggregation: assembling scattered, individually-public data points into a detailed map of where a person goes is different in kind from catching them in a single public moment.

The reverse-warrant cases apply that principle to dragnets. In 2024, the Fifth Circuit held in United States v. Smith that geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional general warrants. In 2025, a federal judge in Nevada reached the same conclusion about a tower dump in United States v. Spurlock. Reeves’s order is the furthest step yet — the first to call tower dumps flatly unconstitutional in every case.

Why Flock is the next domino

Read the definition of a tower dump again, then put a camera where the tower was. An ALPR network photographs every passing car, logs the plate, time, and place, stores it, and lets an officer run the whole collection backward to find one vehicle among millions of innocent ones. It is a reverse, suspicionless dragnet — structurally the same machine the courts are now dismantling for phones. The differences are cosmetic: it tracks your car instead of your phone, and a private vendor runs it instead of a carrier.

That is not our theory alone. Days after Chatrie, a Kansas driver sued the City of Wichita, arguing that an ALPR turns a license plate into the “functional equivalent” of a GPS tracker. It joins the Norfolk case, where the same Fourth Amendment argument is on appeal in our own circuit. The reverse-warrant reasoning that just felled tower dumps points straight at plate readers.

The honest limits

We give you the whole picture, including the parts that cut against us. Reeves’s order binds only the Southern District of Mississippi — persuasive elsewhere, not controlling — and the government may appeal. The courts are split: the Fifth Circuit bars geofence warrants; other courts have upheld similar tools. A “good-faith” exception has let prosecutors keep evidence even where the warrant was condemned. And no court has yet held that an ALPR network is unconstitutional — that question is live, not settled. What we can say is narrower and still powerful: every recent decision on suspicionless digital dragnets moves one direction, and Flock sits in its path.

What it means here

North Carolina does not require police to get a warrant before searching ALPR data; § 20-183.32 makes the data confidential but demands no judge’s sign-off. New Hanover County has built exactly the kind of standing, warrantless, reverse-searchable record of ordinary people’s movements that this line of cases is circling. Our commissioners don’t have to wait for a court to tell them it’s wrong — they hold the contract, and they can end it.

Suspect everyone first, then go looking for the one. That is the general warrant the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid.

What you can do

• Bring this to the County Commission on Aug 17 — here’s how to speak.
• Read how Chatrie already strengthened the case against Flock — our explainer.
• Sign and share the petition — these questions deserve answers on the record.

Sources

• Tower-dump order, U.S. District Court, S.D. Miss. (Judge Carlton Reeves), Aug. 5, 2026 — The Hill; CourtWatch
• Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112 (U.S. June 29, 2026) — opinion (PDF)
• United States v. Smith, No. 23-60321 (5th Cir. 2024) — Justia
• United States v. Spurlock (D. Nev. 2025) — Bloomberg Law
• Kansas ALPR lawsuit (Wichita) — Reason

This page is general information about North Carolina and federal law, not legal advice, and creates no attorney-client relationship. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed North Carolina attorney.