The government’s ongoing violation of fundamental civil liberties would have been very familiar to the men who gathered in 1791 to adopt the Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers battled an 18th century version of the wholesale surveillance that the government is accused of doing today – an expansive abuse of power by King George II and III that invaded the colonists’ communications privacy.

Using “writs of assistance” [another name for “general warrants”] the King authorized his agents to carry out wide-ranging searches of anyone, anywhere, and anytime regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. These “hated writs”spurred colonists toward revolution and directly motivated James Madison’s crafting of the Fourth Amendment.

[The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Stanford v. Texas: “Vivid in the memory of the newly independent Americans were those general warrants known as writs of assistance under which officers of the Crown had so bedeviled the colonists.” And the Supreme Court said in Marcus v. Search Warrant of Property: “The Bill of Rights was fashioned against the background of knowledge that unrestricted power of search and seizure could also be an instrument for stifling liberty of expression.”]

We’ve now come full circle. The president has essentially updated this page from King George’s playbook, engaging in dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.

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