The Search the Founders Fought

Fireworks and cookouts are the easy part of the Fourth. The harder part is remembering what the day is actually about — and whether we still mean it. On the country’s 250th birthday, it’s worth telling a story most of us never learned in school, because it runs straight through Wilmington’s streets.

The grievance that helped start a revolution

Before 1776, British customs officers in the colonies carried something called a writ of assistance — a general warrant. It named no suspect, no address, no particular thing to be seized. It was a standing license to search anyone, anywhere, at any time, on no more than the officer’s say-so. To the colonists, that was the essence of tyranny: not that the Crown could search a guilty man, but that it could search everyone, all the time, without cause.

In 1761, a Boston lawyer named James Otis stood up and argued for hours against the writs. He lost the case. But a young John Adams was in the room, and decades later he wrote that “then and there the child Independence was born.” The objection to blanket, suspicionless searching wasn’t a footnote to the American founding. It was one of its sparks.

The Fourth Amendment was written to kill the general warrant

When the founders got their chance, they wrote the answer directly into the Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be secure against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and it says any warrant must be backed by probable cause and must “particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Every one of those words is aimed at the writ of assistance. No fishing. No dragnets. No searching a whole community to see what turns up. If the government wants to track you, it needs a specific reason and a judge.

The founders didn’t ban the general warrant because it never caught anyone. They banned it because a government that can watch everyone answers to no one.

Now look at our streets

A Flock automated license plate reader does not name a suspect. It does not describe a particular car, or a particular crime, or a particular day. It photographs every vehicle that passes, logs its plate, time, location, and features, and files it into a searchable, nationwide database — on everyone, continuously, with no warrant and no probable cause. Strung together across a network, those reads become a map of where you go: the clinic, the church, the union hall, the gun range, the lawyer’s office.

Read the Fourth Amendment again, then read that description. A suspicionless system that searches an entire population’s movements and keeps the results is not the opposite of a general warrant. It is a general warrant — automated, and pointed at all of us at once. The technology is new. The thing the Revolution objected to is not.

This isn’t abstract here. New Hanover County’s Flock network was searched roughly 2.98 million times in sixteen months, and the county redacted the name of every agency and officer who ran a search. A standing search of the whole county, and no way for the public to see who is doing the searching. Otis would have recognized it on sight.

The courts are catching up to the founders

The Supreme Court has started saying so. In Carpenter and Jones it held that long-term tracking of a person’s movements is a Fourth Amendment search, and in Chatrie v. United States (June 2026) it extended that logic, rejecting the very excuse — “a private company is holding the data” — that police use to justify warrantless ALPR searches. The founders’ instinct and the modern Court are converging on the same line: the government does not get to track everyone and sort out the reasons later.

What the day asks of us

Benjamin Franklin’s warning is carved into this debate: a people who trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety end up with neither. He wrote it in an argument that had nothing to do with cameras. The principle outlived the argument, which is exactly why it still fits.

You can honor the 250th with a flag and a grill — you should. But the more fitting tribute is to insist the founding principle still means something on the actual roads where we live. The generation that fought a war over general warrants would not have accepted one bolted to a pole on Market Street because it came with a software subscription.

The good news is the same as it was in 1776: this is decided by ordinary people who refuse. Communities across North Carolina and the country have already said no and won. Wilmington can be one of them.

Sources & further reading

• James Otis and the writs of assistance; John Adams’ “child Independence was born” — Paxton’s Case, Boston, 1761.
• U.S. Const. amend. IV (probable cause and the particularity requirement).
• What Chatrie v. United States means for Flock cameras.
• Three million searches, zero names: inside New Hanover County’s Flock data.
• The ALPR cases working through the courts.