Warrantless Searches in The United States - History

History

In the Thirteen Colonies, agents of the British Empire conducted warrantless searches on homes of colonists, which was viewed as an abuse of power. The Fourth Amendment barred all warrantless searches; nevertheless, the interpretation and limitations of the Fourth Amendment and the permissibility of warrantless searches under certain circumstances (such as wartime) have been important in the history of executive and judicial power in the United States, where it is only legal under martial law.

During the American Revolutionary War, "the Continental Congress regularly received quantities of intercepted British and Tory mail. See intelligence in the American Revolutionary War.

In 1975, the Church Committee, a United States Senate select committee chaired by Frank Church of Idaho, a Democrat, investigated Cold War intelligence-gathering by the federal government, including warrantless surveillance. The committee report found the "Americans who violated no criminal law and represented no genuine threat to the 'national security' have been targeted, regardless of the stated predicate. In many cases, the implementation of wiretaps and bugs has also been fraught with procedural violations, even when the required procedures were meager, thus compounding the abuse. The inherently intrusive nature of electronic surveillance, moreover, has enabled the Government to generate vast amounts of information – unrelated to any legitimate governmental interest – about the personal and political lives of American citizens."

The "potential criminal liability of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency for operations such as SHAMROCK (interception of all international cable traffic from 1945 to 1975) and MINARET (use of watchlists of U.S. dissidents and potential civil disturbers to provide intercept information to law enforcement agencies from 1969 to 1973)" helped persuade president Gerald Ford in 1976 to seek surveillance legislation, which was ultimately enacted as Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.

Abuses of power by the federal government led to reform legislation in the 1970s. Advancing technology began to present questions not directly addressed by the legislation as early as 1985.

In its 1985 report "Electronic Surveillance and Civil Liberties," the nonpartisan Congressional Office of Technology Assessment suggested legislation be considered for a surveillance oversight board. Congress disbanded this agency in 1995.