While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are battling in their final round in the Democratic primaries and Donald Trump is arguing that Clinton should be in prison for failing to safeguard state secrets while she was secretary of state, the same FBI that is diligently investigating her is quietly and perniciously seeking to cut more holes in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

That amendment – which requires the government to obtain a search warrant issued by a judge based upon some evidence of criminal wrongdoing, called probable cause, before the government can search persons, houses, papers or effects – is the linchpin of the right to privacy, famously referred to by Justice Louis Brandeis as the right to be let alone.

The Fourth Amendment has a painful yet unambiguous history. The essence of that history is the well-documented and nearly universal Colonial revulsion to the British use of general warrants.

General warrants, which were usually issued in secret in London, permitted British soldiers and agents in America to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found. General warrants were not based upon any individualized suspicion, much less any probable cause. Their stated purpose was the need to enforce the Stamp Act, a totalitarian measure that cost more to enforce than it generated in revenue.