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Require warrants and particularity for digital searches, close data-broker workarounds, and reform US-person queries inside foreign-intelligence surveillance.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
Cited Sources
11
What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
The Fourth Amendment has to move with surveillance capacity. Government should not be able to avoid a warrant by buying the same sensitive data from a broker, querying a foreign- intelligence database for a US person's communications, or asking a platform for reverse location searches that identify everyone near a place.
Current law is no longer the stale "third-party doctrine solves everything" story. The Court held years ago that historical cell-site location records can be a search. Its 2026 geofence ruling extended that logic: obtaining a large group's location-history data through a geofence request was also found to be a Fourth Amendment search, with probable-cause and particularity questions left for further proceedings. Commercially available information has also become a government-surveillance shortcut, with official intelligence guidance acknowledging that purchased data can reveal intimate details about people's lives.
Require warrants based on probable cause and particularity for geofence requests, reverse-keyword searches, historical location histories, device extractions, persistent identifiers, and other sensitive digital searches involving US persons.
Close the data-broker workaround: government should not buy or obtain through contract what it would need a warrant, subpoena, court order, or FISA process to compel directly.
Reauthorize or restore Section 702 only with US-person-query reform, including judicial approval or a warrant-equivalent process for searches designed to find Americans' communications, plus emergency exceptions, audits, and reporting.
Require minimization, deletion, delayed notice where safe, suppression remedies, and public reporting for digital warrants and bulk-like requests.
Preserve genuine emergency, consent, cybersecurity-defense, and foreign-target intelligence authorities, but make them time-limited, logged, reviewable, and narrow.
The point is not to blind investigators or intelligence agencies. It is to stop capability from erasing constitutional architecture. A government that can search everyone first and particularize later has recreated the general warrant in digital form.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.