The Fourth Amendment is at risk
and along with it the continuation of our liberal democracy. If you have any doubt, I strongly urge you to readFree to Search and Seize, an op ed in today's New York Times by David K. Shipler.
He begins by recounting a number of the things that have, despite the lessons we had in theory learned in the 1970s, limited the reach of the Fourth Amendment, actions by all three branches of government. He then offers these words, which I urge you to read carefully:
For over a decade now, the government has tried to make us more secure by chipping away at the one provision of the Bill of Rights that pivots on the word “secure” — the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.”The founding fathers, who sought security from government, would probably reject today’s conventional wisdom that liberty and security are at odds, and that one must be sacrificed for the other. In their experience, the chief threat to individual security came from government itself, as in the house-to-house searches conducted by British customs officers under blanket “writs of assistance.” After the Boston lawyer James Otis Jr. eloquently challenged the writs in 1761, John Adams, who was present in the crowded courtroom, wrote of the audience’s rage, “Then and there the child independence was born.”
Please keep reading.
