{"database": "openregs", "table": "crs_reports", "rows": [["IF13315", "Selected Federal Legislation on Search and Seizure Authority", "2026-09-17T04:00:00Z", "2026-09-19T12:08:00Z", "Active", "Resources", "Cassandra J. Barnum, Tamsin G. Harrington, Andreas Kuersten", null, "The Fourth Amendment protects the \u201cright of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures[.]\u201d As interpreted by the Supreme Court, the Amendment imposes certain limits on searches and seizures by the government. Within these limits, Congress has the option to further restrict or explicitly authorize a variety of law enforcement activities by legislation. This In Focus identifies a selection of such laws Congress has previously enacted and provides considerations for Congress related to potential legislation in the realm of search and seizure authority.\nFourth Amendment Backdrop\nCourts have determined that a Fourth Amendment search occurs if \u201cthe Government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area\u201d or \u201cwhen the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.\u201d The Supreme Court has said that \u201cseizure\u2019 of property occurs when there is some meaningful interference with an individual\u2019s possessory interests in that property.\u201d If a law enforcement activity qualifies as a search or seizure, then the Fourth Amendment requires it to be reasonable, which ordinarily means that the search or seizure must be conducted pursuant to a warrant supported by probable cause and issued by a neutral magistrate (with some exceptions). To satisfy the probable cause standard to obtain a search warrant, law enforcement must generally show a likelihood that (1) the materials sought are \u201cseizable by virtue of being connected with criminal activity,\u201d and (2) the materials \u201cwill be found in the place to be searched.\u201d The Fourth Amendment dictates that the resulting warrant must \u201cparticularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.\u201d The purpose of this requirement is to prohibit \u201cgeneral searches\u201d and not permit seizure of \u201cone thing under a warrant describing another.\u201d\nFederal Law Governing Search and Seizure Authority\nFederal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 governs processes for federal search warrants. It addresses venue; persons or property subject to seizure; the process for obtaining, issuing, and executing warrants; and motions to return property and suppress evidence. Substantively, Congress has enacted legislation to specifically authorize or further restrict law enforcement search and seizure activities in particular circumstances. The following are selected examples of such legislation, presented chronologically.\nThe Wiretap Act \nFollowing two 1967 landmark Supreme Court cases addressing the application of the Fourth Amendment to law enforcement surveillance of communications, Congress enacted Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, also referred to as the Wiretap Act, with the purpose of both protecting the privacy of communications and allowing their interception and use as appropriate to combat organized crime. Title III, as amended, prohibits the real-time interception of wire, oral, and electronic communications, except as authorized in the statute, and sets forth detailed procedures for their access by law enforcement in criminal investigations. \nUnder these procedures, a court must find probable cause that \u201cparticular communications\u201d about an enumerated offense will be obtained through interception. The statute also contains prerequisites for approval and demonstrations related to particularity and necessity, and further requires that law enforcement minimize the interception of communications not covered by the authorization. Courts have assessed compliance with this provision by analyzing whether minimization techniques were reasonable based on the facts and circumstances of each case. The statute also provides protections for intercepted communications, criminal penalties and evidentiary exclusion provisions for violations, and notice requirements. \nThe Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA)\nFollowing revelations regarding widespread privacy violations by the federal government during the Watergate era, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 to govern domestic foreign intelligence surveillance. FISA provides a statutory framework for government agencies to obtain authorization from specialized courts to gather foreign intelligence by means of electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen registers and trap and trace devices, or the production of certain business records. To obtain a court order under FISA, the executive branch must generally show, among other things, probable cause that a target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. \nSection 702 of FISA authorized programmatic surveillance of foreign intelligence traveling through domestic communications infrastructure, subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). (FISA Section 702 was automatically repealed pursuant to statute in April 2026, though certain associated surveillance authorities will remain in effect through early 2027.) The FISC was, in addition to other responsibilities, required to ensure that federal agencies\u2019 searching of data gathered pursuant to Section 702 was consistent with the Fourth Amendment. There were numerous statutory querying restrictions specific to the FBI, including that FBI personnel could not conduct queries using U.S.-person terms or identifiers solely addressing criminal activity (except in limited circumstances) and were required to seek senior officials\u2019 approval for any query involving a U.S.-person term. At least one federal district court has held that querying Section 702 data with U.S.-person terms presumptively requires a warrant.\nThe Privacy Protection Act\nIn 1978, the Supreme Court held in Zurcher v. Stanford Daily that the First Amendment\u2019s guarantee of press freedom did not preclude law enforcement\u2019s search of a student newspaper office. Congress responded to Zurcher in 1980 by enacting the Privacy Protection Act (PPA), which limits the ability of federal, state, and local officials to conduct certain searches and seizures implicating First Amendment activities. A Senate Judiciary Committee Report accompanying the PPA expressed concern that \u201cthe search warrant procedure in itself does not sufficiently protect the press and other innocent third parties,\u201d requiring additional protections beyond Fourth Amendment warrant requirements for those engaged in \u201cpublic communication.\u201d The PPA therefore generally prohibits, with exceptions, law enforcement search or seizure of news media work product materials. The PPA also prohibits searches and seizures of documentary materials (defined as \u201cmaterials upon which information is recorded\u201d), but with additional exceptions authorizing searches when grand jury subpoenas have been or would be ineffective. The PPA creates a civil cause of action for damages against governmental entities or individual government actors who conduct searches or seizures in violation of the statute, but does not permit the exclusion of evidence from a criminal trial of a third party based on a PPA violation. \nThe Electronic Communications Privacy Act \nCongress also enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), which, among other things, amended the Wiretap Act to cover electronic communications, and both generally prohibited access and provided procedures for law enforcement to access certain other communications records in prescribed circumstances. Such procedures included use of devices that obtain phone records in real time, referred to as pen registers and trap and trace devices, which record dialing and routing information to identify the source and destination of a wire or electronic communication. Pursuant to the statute, law enforcement access must be configured to avoid the collection of content information and can be authorized for up to sixty days with extensions. Law enforcement must demonstrate \u201crelevan[ce] to an ongoing criminal investigation\u201d to obtain a court order, which identifies the device, the suspect, and the offense, and may include direction for assistance from a provider. Such orders are sealed and disclosure of their existence is prohibited. \nThe Stored Communications Act\nTitle II of ECPA is the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which created additional statutory protections for particular categories of electronic communications and related metadata that are stored with third party service providers. The Senate Judiciary report accompanying ECPA described the proliferation of electronic data storage and the risk that such data \u201cmay be subject to no constitutional privacy protection\u201d because it \u201cis subject to control by a third party computer operator.\u201d In general terms, the SCA restricts when certain information may be disclosed by Electronic Communication Services or Remote Computing Services, which typically include entities such as \u201ccell phone providers, email providers, or social media platforms\u201d and cloud computing providers. Pursuant to a provision of the SCA codified at 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 2703, the government may compel such providers to share communications\u2019 content and metadata if the government obtains the requisite level of legal process. Generally, contents of recent communications require a search warrant, while older and non-content information can be obtained with a subpoena or court order. In 2018, the Supreme Court applied the Fourth Amendment to certain location data and held that, while the SCA broadly authorized disclosure of non-content information to law enforcement pursuant to court order, law enforcement could not constitutionally compel the location data at issue in that case without a search warrant because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.\nConsiderations for Congress\nLaws relating to search and seizure generally reflect congressional balancing of law enforcement interests and privacy interests. For example, by limiting law enforcement searches of the news media with the PPA, Congress prevented law enforcement from obtaining confidential source information in some circumstances; the resulting potential impairment of leak investigations, however, is balanced against promotion of press freedoms. With the Wiretap Act and FISA, Congress likewise struck a balance, authorizing powerful investigative techniques but imposing substantial restrictions on their use. In the SCA, Congress opted to tie the requisite legal process to the sensitivity of the data, authorizing law enforcement access to some materials with subpoenas or court orders while requiring search warrants for others. With the caveat that \u201cno Act of Congress can authorize a violation of the Constitution,\u201d Congress has the power to regulate executive branch exercise of search and seizure authority to effectuate its policy priorities.\nCongress has not always opted to act via major legislation. For example, Congress created discrete criminal prohibitions related to law enforcement exercise of search and seizure authority in Title 18, such as willfully exceeding authority in executing a search warrant or exercising such authority \u201cwith unnecessary severity.\u201d Congress has also acted in situations where courts have found that the Fourth Amendment does not protect certain information. For example, after the Supreme Court held in 1976 that bank customers do not have a right to privacy in their bank records, Congress passed the Right to Financial Privacy Act to restrict warrantless law enforcement access to bank records.\nIn the 119th Congress, proposed legislation in the search and seizure realm has addressed, in alphabetical order: automated license plate readers, drones, and other surveillance technology; border searches; data brokers; financial records; FISA reform, including electronic surveillance authority and a proposed full FISA repeal; heightened warrant requirements; immigration enforcement; procedures and other requirements under the SCA; and warrant execution procedures, among others.", "https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF13315/IF13315.3.pdf", "https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/HTML/IF13315.html"]], "columns": ["id", "title", "publish_date", "update_date", "status", "content_type", "authors", "topics", "summary", "pdf_url", "html_url"], "primary_keys": ["id"], "primary_key_values": ["IF13315"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.20812125876545906, "source": "U.S. government sources, plus a few identifier registries; each is listed on the methodology page", "source_url": "https://datadawn.org/methodology#data", "license": "Public Domain (U.S. Government data)", "license_url": "https://www.regulations.gov/faq"}