Amendment 4: Search and Seizure, history homework help

Go to the National Constitution Center Website and read “Amendment 4: Search and Seizure,” located at http://constitutioncenter.org/constitution/the-amendments/amendment-4-search-and-seizure.  Be prepared to discuss. 

From the e-Activity, examine the difficulties associated with interpreting the specific words and phrases of the Fourth Amendment. Explain your rationale.

First, take a position for or against the exclusionary rule.  Next, analyze the major ramifications of having or not having the exclusionary rule.  Justify your response.

Please respond to the following statement:

The Fourth Amendment and the difficulties associated with interpreting the specific words and phrases pose enormous dilemmas and confusion around the topic. One of the difficulties the e-Activity mentioned was search and seizure. Just how much power should our government have when it comes to search and seizure? When analogies and metaphors are used to describe why a situation would be subject to search and seizure, it begins to get hazy for a person to understand the reasoning behind the intrusion. Prime example, mail versus email. Written mail is seen as something that is tangible. This means we have a good idea how packages and letters get circulated mostly because the components of the operation are tangible and subject to physical examination. With this knowledge, we gain a slight measure of assurance from this understanding that violations of our expectation of confidentiality in our letters would be highly unfeasible for the government to execute without a warrant. The same cannot be said with emails because they are intangible. Emails are intangible because we cannot be physical touch or hold an email. But we still view emails as “letters”. Because we view them as letters, do emails follow the same expectation of privacy as our tangible written letters. It is all about the wording and how individuals view things that make upholding the Fourth Amendment challenging.