Changing Times ~ The Fourth Amendment and Freedom from Government Intrusion

America, the land of the free. The Bill of Rights protects freedom of speech, religion, press, and expression in the first amendment, personal weapons in the second, and freedom from an unjust trial or cruel and unusual punishment in the 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th. The common theme is protection of private citizens from unfair treatment by an overbearing government. The fourth amendment reads “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects shall not be violated, and 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.” Our founders penned this intending to forever protect our natural and God-given right to privacy, a fundamental of liberty. It’s interesting to compare what it meant then with what it should mean now; the essence of privacy hasn’t changed, but technology has added myriad means of compromise.

In colonial America, the British government held the colonies in a tight grip and squeezed every penny they could out of them. Resentment drove certain production and trade underground, which in turn provoked the king of England to use further oppressive tactics to satisfy his greed. Writs of assistance were general search warrants that allowed soldiers virtually unrestrained search and seizure of property in homes and workplaces, and the people were powerless to legally resist. The warrants did not expire until the issuing king himself expired!

The 4th amendment was the Founders' remedy.  It requires that search warrants be obtained that specifically detail the place to be searched, and the evidence or goods to be sought and seized.  This eliminated the incredibly invasive and unpredictable searches and seizures.  Restrained by this amendment, the government would have to mind its own business.  But how could our Founders have anticipated the technology that has forever changed the very idea of privacy itself and therefore complicated the application of the 4^th amendment in recent history?

Contrary, I am certain, to our founders’ intentions, the federal government now operates with bold disregard for the fourth amendment. The National Security Agency, NSA, was created to protect national security and prevent terrorist attacks by scanning messages and communications for suspicious keywords, phrases, patterns, or connections.  Now, the agency possesses a complete record of every phone call, and receives copies of all electronic communications. 

In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, people traveled to each other’s homes regularly for business or friendly visits.  Early Americans would have been appalled if the government had listened in on private conversations; but today, the government is doing just that.  The telephone was invented in 1876, and began to be commercialized in 1878; if you think about it, all it did was extend the distance of private conversations—enhance your ability to talk with someone as though they were sitting right there in your living room.  Though it isn’t actually listening in on conversations—at least not to our knowledge—the NSA now possesses a complete record of who we are calling, and how often.  This is every bit as intrusive as a writ of assistance from the king. 

Sometimes the best communications medium was mail – long carried by horseback or coach, and then rail. Letters were often sealed with wax and signet to prove authority and authenticity and protect privacy. It was difficult to access the contents of such a letter undetected. Today, much of this “snail mail” has been supplanted by email, or electronically transmitted mail, which travels by cable and fiber-optic networks. The NSA has installed “splitters” at many of the telecommunication network junctions in the United States for the sole purpose of intercepting and copying data.  These devices forward one copy to our intended recipient and the other to the NSA.  To our founders it would have been an abomination that the government would pilfer our private correspondence this way.

The fourth amendment was intended to and for a time did significantly reduce government interference in the lives of private citizens. While technology can be a valuable tool, it should not dictate changes in values, and we need to take steps to honor and restore the spirit of the 4^th Amendment by being aware and vigilant to protect our personal privacy in this elusive but burgeoning new dimension of personal communication options. 

Works Cited

"How the NSA's Domestic Spying Program Works" Electronic Frontier Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 14  Oct. 2013. <https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/how-it-works>.

"NSA Has Massive Database of Americans' Phone Calls." USATODAY.com. N.p., 11 May 2006. Web. 14 Oct. 2013. <http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm>.