@BillRM,
This is what Wiki gives which it is reasonable to assume is correct.
Quote:The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted in response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, a type of general search warrant issued by the British government and a major source of tension in pre-Revolutionary America. The Fourth Amendment was introduced in Congress in 1789 by James Madison, along with the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, in response to Anti-Federalist objections to the new Constitution. Congress submitted the amendment to the states on September 28, 1789. By December 15, 1791, the necessary three-quarters of the states had ratified it. On March 1, 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson announced the adoption of the amendment.
Because the Bill of Rights did not initially apply to the states, and federal criminal investigations were less common in the first century of the nation's history, there is little significant case law for the Fourth Amendment before the 20th century. The amendment was held to apply to the states in Mapp v. Ohio (1961).
Under the Fourth Amendment, search and seizure (including arrest) should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court, usually by a law enforcement officer who has sworn by it. Fourth Amendment case law deals with three central questions: what government activities constitute "search" and "seizure"; what constitutes probable cause for these actions; and how violations of Fourth Amendment rights should be addressed. Early court decisions limited the amendment's scope to a law enforcement officer's physical intrusion onto private property, but with Katz v. United States (1967), the Supreme Court held that its protections, such as the warrant requirement, extend to the privacy of individuals as well as physical locations. Law enforcement officers need a warrant for most search and seizure activities, but the Court has defined a series of exceptions for consent searches, motor vehicle searches, evidence in plain view, exigent circumstances, border searches, and other situations.
The exclusionary rule is one way the amendment is enforced. Established in Weeks v. United States (1914), this rule holds that evidence obtained through a Fourth Amendment violation is generally inadmissible at criminal trials. Evidence discovered as a later result of an illegal search may also be inadmissible as "fruit of the poisonous tree," unless it inevitably would have been discovered by legal means.
In England the word "reasonable", and its opposite, is interpreted as what the man on the Clapham omnibus would think. An early form of the wisdom of numbers. And the first formal step to the abolition of hereditary ruling elites.
It was an American idea that judges and politicians and such like were no more capable of deciding important matters than the man in the street and that any averagely intelligent man, and, I suppose in this enlightened age, woman, could satisfactorily fulfill all the offices of the state.
Anybody who has read Francois Rabelais is likely to think that the average person would be better at judging due to not being so predatory, lazy and corrupt down to n number of generations as judges are likely to be.
It is exactly what Apisa wants that gave rise to the amendment in the first place. It was the mischief of the British "writ of assistance" that gave rise to the Fourth. With Apisa you get the mischief back only with brilliant technological expertise added.
