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The founders understood this problem and built the answer into the Constitution

The fight over government's power to search everyone is older than the country. The Fourth Amendment was written to end it.

A courtroom in Boston, 1761

British customs officers in the colonies carried "writs of assistance." These general warrants let an officer search any house, ship or warehouse, at any time, for anything, without naming a person, place or reason. A Boston lawyer named James Otis argued against them before the colony's highest court.

"Every man's house is his castle, and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle."
James Otis, 1761

Otis lost the case. He won the argument. John Adams, who was in the courtroom, later wrote that the child Independence was born there. When Americans wrote their constitutions, they made general warrants illegal, and in 1791 the Fourth Amendment made the rule national: no warrant may issue without probable cause, and every warrant must describe "the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Four marks of a general warrant

Otis explained what made general warrants so dangerous. Four features, together, turned a search tool into an instrument of arbitrary power:

Discretionary powerThe officer decided whom to search. No judge decided the reason was good enough.
Comprehensive scopeIt reached everything a person had, not one named thing.
Standing authorizationIt did not expire. It could be used again and again.
Accountability evasionNo record let anyone check how it had been used.

The same power, rebuilt in software

Today, records from motor vehicles, taxes, benefits, schools, courts and health programs increasingly flow into connected systems. Officials and contractors can look up almost anyone, often without a specific reason, and the systems keep records indefinitely. Many of those lookups are never shown to the person they concern.

That is all four marks at once. Nobody set out to rebuild the general warrant. It happened one purchase at a time, through a process that never asked whether the systems being bought were constitutional. The protection the founders wrote still exists. It is not being honored.