Application makes clear, the government has not taken the intervening months to address these
concerns. Instead, it persists in its entitlement to the entire email account, without suggesting
how the items that may be seized because there is probable cause to believe that they are
evidence of a crime can be segregated from those that are not.
B.
The Government Seeks an Unconstitutional General Warrant
This Court is also troubled that the government seeks a broad search and seizure warrant
for e-mails and all other content related to this e-mail account. The Supreme Court has
recognized two constitutional protections served by the warrant requirement of the Fourth
Amendment. “First, the magistrate’s scrutiny is intended to eliminate altogether searches not
based on probable cause. The premise here is that any intrusion in the way of search or seizure is
an evil, so that no intrusion at all is justified without a careful prior determination of necessity.”
Coolidge v. N.H., 403 U.S. 443, 467 (1971). Thus, it is this Court’s duty to reject any
applications for search warrants where the standard of probable cause has not been met. Second,
as the Supreme Court has also said, “[T]hose searches deemed necessary should be as limited as
possible. Here, the specific evil is the ‘general warrant’ abhorred by the colonists, and the
problem is not that of intrusion per se, but of a general, exploratory rummaging in a person's
belongings.” Id. To follow the dictates of the Fourth Amendment and to avoid issuing a general
warrant, a court must be careful to ensure that probable cause exists to seize each item specified
in the warrant application.
With respect to searches of electronic information, careful attention must be paid to the
dictates of the particularity requirements of the Fourth Amendment, which limits the
“authorization to search to the specific areas and things for which there is probable cause to
search.” Md. v. Garrison, 480 U.S. 79, 84 (1987). As the Supreme Court has recognized, “the
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