Madison’s draft of what became the Fourth Amendment answered these charges by providing that the “rights of the people to be secured in their persons . . . from all unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated by warrants issued without probable cause . . . or not particularly describing the places to be searched.” 1 Annals of Cong. 434–435 (1789). As ratified, the Fourth Amendment’s Warrant Clause forbids a warrant to “issue” except “upon probable cause,” and requires that it be “particula[r]” (which is to say, individualized) to “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” And we have held that, even when a warrant is not constitutionally necessary, the Fourth Amendment’s general prohibition of “unreasonable” searches imports the same requirementof individualized suspicion. See Chandler v. Miller, 520
U. S. 305, 308 (1997).
|