| > 4th Amendment The 4th Amendment - and specifically its warrant requirement - is often misunderstood to be about protecting individuals from government searches. Warrants will generally be granted, and the search of any particular individual is going to happen if the government wants it to. The protection for individuals happens later when evidence that was improperly obtained could be ruled inadmissible by the exclusionary rule. The search will probably happen, but the results of that search may not apply in court. The warrant requirement is an attempt to protect society in general against threats like the writs of assistance that were imposed upon the colonies. From the perspective of an individual search, obtaining a warrant is a trivial speed bump. If you wanted to search an entire city, on the other hand, those speed bumps serve as a rate limiter. It is just not possible for even a large, corrupt, overfunded and overstaffed police force to "particularly describe" what each search is for and get each one rubber stamped by a judge. Our police and judicial systems have many inefficiencies like this by design. In modern times, we probably need to extend this idea to the public space, to impose some kind of new rate-limiter. It doesn't matter if the government can ask for occasional data, but allowing a continual collection and a permanent database is the kind of "general warrant" style collection that we need to prevent. The problem is when data is the aggregated, so we need to strongly rate limit the collection so there is no data to aggregate. By the way - while license plate data is bad enough, I hope everybody remembers that they are making a detailed map of their movements and a graph of probably relationships when they carry a cell phone thanks to COTRAVELER. That slide from the Snowden archive didn't get a lot of press, but it is probably one of the more easily abused programs out of all of the recent revelations. |
Yes, but at the time the Constitution was written warrants were a requirements for a search. If a British officer showed up on your property and demanded to search it without a warrant you could literally shoot him.
This led to the issuance of "general warrants," allowing British officers to search entire houses and estates. The Fourth Amendment was a direct reaction to that, which is enshrined in the language "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."
But you conveniently left out the most important part: the rationale at the beginning of the Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
The whole purpose of the Amendment was to protect individuals from government searches. The text says so right on its face: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
The exclusionary rule or "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, with which you seem to be confusing the Amendment itself, is a twentieth century invention of the Warren court.