On this Independence Day, I'm thankful for Edward Snowden

[deurbano]

39. "How Unreasonable Searches of Private Documents Caused the American Revolution"

http://www.juancole.com/2013/07/unreasonable-documents-revolution.html

by Juan Cole


<<Just FYI, the Restore the Fourth movement in defense of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is holding protests all over the US today.

On the Fourth of July, Americans should be celebrating the freedoms enshrined in the US constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. At one time, Americans minded when the government usurped their rights and made over-reaching claims to be able to invade their privacy. No more. Most Americans have become little more than bleating sheep, perfectly happy to be sheared by faceless bureaucrats. They are willing to surrender to the state their most private information, the contemporary electronic records of everywhere they go, who they talk to and for how long, who they email, and even the contents of their communications. With the rise of datamining software, this information can be extremely revealing, and government and contractors with access to it can engage in all sorts of blackmail, insider trading, and corruption. Since the surveillance apparatus is “classified” and top secret, there is no effective oversight to ensure against public harm.

The Founding generation of Americans was particularly exercised by the privacy of their papers, the equivalent of today’s email and electronic records. They put the Fourth Amendment into the Constitution, which says:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, 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."

Note that “papers” are distinguished here from “effects.” That is not an accident, as Donald A. Dripps argued [pdf]:

“The Fourth Amendment refers to “papers” because the Founders understood the seizure of papers to be an outrageous abuse distinct from general warrants. The English courts and resolutions of the House of Commons condemned both abuses distinctly. The controversy was closely followed in America, where colonial Whigs sympathized with, and even idolized, John Wilkes, who successfully sued for damages for the seizure of his papers. America inherited the common law ban on searches for papers, adopted constitutional provisions that mentioned papers distinctly, and refused to modify the common law ban by statute un til the Civil War. The one Founding – era attempt to authorize seizing papers by statute was condemned as contrary to common law and natural right and never passed into law. Although Congress authorized seizing papers to enforce the revenue laws during the Civil War, it took until the 1880s for a challenge to reach the Supreme Court. That challenge was Boyd , which remained the law for another ninety years. Boyd rightly held that “papers” deserve more constitutional protection than “effects.” Special protection does not, however, ineluctably mean absolute immunity. The seizures that aroused outrage in the 1760s were indiscriminate, expropriating, unregulated , and inquisitorial. A regulated, discriminate, and nonrivalrous process for inspecting documents is different.”....>>