The state has discovered that the most efficient way to manage what you believe is to reach you before you know you are being reached. Consider a man walking into a church in Prescott, Arizona on a Sunday morning. He carries a phone, as everyone does. He does not know that the building has been wrapped inside an invisible digital boundary, that his device will be logged the instant he crosses it, and that for days afterward his screen will fill with political advertising paid for by a foreign government. He never consented. He was never asked. He was not told. His own pastor, in most cases,...

The men who wrote the Fourth Amendment had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued. They had lived under writs of assistance — general warrants that let a customs officer search any house, any ship, any person, on no suspicion at all. So they wrote a sentence meant to settle the matter for good: the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. It was a line no administration could cross, but the history of...

There is a line in the Fourth Amendment that was supposed to settle this. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. It is not a suggestion. It does not contain an exception for emergencies, for terrorism, for immigration, or for your own good. It was written by men who had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued, and who meant to draw a line that no administration could cross no matter how frightened the...