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The digital world encodes our lives with incriminating clues. How you travel, live, love, and shop are tracked through growing surveillance technologies. Police have recognized this reality and are actively exploiting new surveillance tools for investigative purposes. The Fourth Amendment--the constitutional protection meant to limit police search powers--has not kept up with the privacy and security threats of these new digital technologies. Current doctrine has remained stymied by legal tests asking all the wrong questions about "reasonable expectations of privacy" and "trespass" searches. While the Supreme Court has acknowledged that "digital is different," it has not yet provided a coherent theory to protect individuals from growing digital surveillance. This Article offers an alternative Fourth Amendment theory based on the harm of rummaging--a principle that can trace its lineage from the Founding debates around General Warrants and the Writs of Assistance to the Supreme Court's most recent cases on cell phone location data. Fear of government agents rummaging into private homes and papers motivated the passage of the Fourth Amendment and has remained a doctrinally coherent throughline recurring in Fourth Amendment cases. This Article develops the "rummaging test" as a new way to see the harms of government collection of digital evidence. The Article excavates rummaging as an original justification for the Fourth Amendment and then demonstrates how the digital rummaging concept perfectly responds to the harms of government surveillance in the digital age. The rummaging test recognizes that the arbitrary, overbroad, invasive, exposing collection of personal data reflects the same harms that gave rise to the Fourth Amendment in the first instance. The Article seeks to refocus attention on the government's power to rummage through personal data by examining legal challenges around smart-home data and long-term pole cameras. The hope is to move the longstanding background principle against rummaging to the foreground of Fourth Amendment analysis and thereby answer some of the hardest questions facing courts confronting challenges to digital surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Topics discussed include the definition of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment, the concerns related to Fourth Amendment reasonableness that emerge from historical materials, and lawyer James Otis' case against the writs of assistance in Massachusetts.

The providers of network services (and the makers of network devices) know an enormous amount about our lives. Because they do, these network intermediaries are being asked with increasing frequency to assist the government in solving crimes or gathering intelligence. Given how much they know about us, if the government can secure the assistance of these intermediaries, it will enjoy a huge increase in its theoretical capacity for surveillance--the ability to learn almost anything about anyone. This has the potential to create serious social harm, even assuming that the government continues to adhere to ordinary democratic norms and the rule of law. One possible solution to this problem is for network intermediaries to refuse government requests for aid and attempt to sustain those refusals in court. Although this proposal has received an enormous amount of attention, there is substantial cause for skepticism about how well it can work. Congress has given the government wide authority to demand information and assistance through tools like subpoenas, the Stored Communications Act, and Title III. Even when the government does not have specific statutory authorization, courts have interpreted the All Writs Act to authorize a great deal of open-ended aid, consistent with the well-settled Anglo-American history of third-party assistance in law enforcement. It is also far from unheard of for the executive to read restrictions on its surveillance authority narrowly, and its own inherent powers broadly, to engage in surveillance that is quasi- or extra-legal. A superior (or at least complementary) response to the problem is to restrict network intermediaries themselves by limiting how much they can learn about us and how long they can retain it. This approach treats enhanced state surveillance as a problem created by the intermediaries' stockpiling of data, and proposes to solve it at the root--which would, as a useful side effect, solve a number of other problems created by that stockpiling, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses James Otis' speech on the writs of assistance to a Massachusetts court, for which in awe was recorded by John Adams. It traces John Adams' efforts to document and chronicle the struggle for Independence and to defend the character and abilities of James Otis. He credited Otis as sparking the Revolution.