More Holes In The Fourth Amendment

Here they go again. The Obama administration has asked its allies in Congress to introduce legislation that would permit the feds to continue their march through the Fourth Amendment when it comes to obtaining private information about all of us.

The Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to be left alone, was written largely in response to legislation Parliament enacted in the colonial era that permitted British soldiers to write their own search warrants and then use those warrants as a legal basis to enter private homes. The ostensible purpose of doing that was to search through the colonists' papers looking for stamps, which the Stamp Act required the colonists to affix to all documents in their possession. The laws that permitted the soldier-written search warrants and the Stamp Act were the British government's fatal political mistakes, which arguably caused a major shift in colonial opinion toward secession from Britain 10 years before the bloody part of the Revolution began.

More