Threats To The Fourth Amendment

[From article]
Although Americans now live in a soft police state, we may not understand how we got to this point, or why reclaiming the Fourth Amendment is essential to retaining our exceptionalism that flows from freedom. Also, a proposed 21st Century Fourth Amendment introduced in the Virginia General Assembly this year is a model that can restore this Bill of Right to its rightful status.
The Fourth Amendment is quintessentially American even though it is based in English common law. It inherently relies on the separation of powers, but that too comes from the common law, and was forged through centuries-old battles between freedom and tyranny.
[. . .]
Government violates our privacy, especially with its electronic surveillance and arbitrary interception of phone and digital records. The Fourth Amendment, however, is historically and correctly based in property rights and the law of trespass.

Government may engage in acts that otherwise would be trespass when there is imminent risk to persons or property, and that includes “plain-view” violations of the law. There is also a separate reasonable exception for the safety of police officers that daily risk their own security for us. When those reasonable exceptions do not exist, government is supposed to then follow the warrant process of the Fourth Amendment before any search or seizure.
It is of no small irony that government often relies on claims of security in order to violate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees of security from government trespass under non-emergency circumstances. Security and good law enforcement, however, begin with law enforcement officials following the law themselves.
[. . .]
Laws are written by one branch, executed by another, and warrants for their lawful enforcement are issued by yet another.
It is of course accepted without question that police departments must obtain warrants from judges, yet federal law enforcement agencies unilaterally issue their own warrants called “administrative subpoenas.” These unilaterally issued warrants institutionalize evasions of probable cause. Even before 9-11, the Drug Enforcement Administration used judge-less warrants to harvest phone records. How can this be?
[. . .]
Institutionalized bureaucratic violations of the Fourth Amendment, however, can be directly traced to the expansion of the administrative state under the New Deal.
The Administrative Procedures Act enacted in 1946, and expanded since, has disemboweled the constitutional separation of powers and guarantee of republican government, giving bureaucratic agencies the power to not merely enforce, but make and adjudicate, laws affecting the public.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/04/americas_soft_police_state_.html

April 24, 2015
America's Soft Police State
By Mark J. Fitzgibbons