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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: On the Eve of the NSA Warrantless Search Pretend Hearings Oh, I get it now! The Preznit thinks 'e's 'enery the Eighth! "I'm 'enery the Eighth, I am, 'enery the Eighth I am I am, I got married to the widow next door..." "Although British law required that warrants be issued for the police to search a person's residence, the British Colonial government relied on general warrants, called writs of assistance, which gave officials a license to search almost everywhere for almost everything. The notion of a general warrant dated back to the Tudor reign under Henry VIII, and resistance to its broad reach began to grow in the early 18th century. Critics attacked the general warrants as "a badge of slavery upon the whole people, exposing every man's house to be entered into, and searched by persons unknown to him." But the government still used them, and they became a major source of friction between His Majesty's Government and the American colonists. The problem with the general warrant was that it lacked specificity. In England in 1763, for example, a typical warrant issued by the Secretary of State commanded "diligent search" for the unidentified author, printer, and publisher of a satirical journal, The North Briton, and the seizure of their papers. At least five houses were subsequently searched, 49 (mostly innocent) people were arrested, and thousands of books and papers confiscated. Opposition to the warrants was widespread in England, and the opposition gradually forced the government to restrict their usage. Chief Justice Sir Charles Pratt, on general warrants (1762): To enter a man's house by virtue of a nameless warrant in order to procure evidence, is worse than the Spanish Inquisition; [it is] a law under which no Englishman would wish to live for an hour. Despite its restriction in the mother country, the use of general warrants remained widespread in the colonies, and constituted one of the colonists' major complaints against Great Britain. In a famous speech against the writs of assistance, James Otis, a member of the colonial Massachusetts assembly, charged that they went "against the fundamental principles of law, the privilege of house. . . . [It is] the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, that was ever found in an English law-book." Following the Revolution, the states enacted a variety of laws limiting the use of such warrants, and when James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment spelled out further restrictions on the use of warrants." (snip) (emphasis added) http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/rightsof/accused.htm I stopped there in my excerpt, because the following paragraph contained stuff about how "the Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures", and other now obsolete stuff.
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