The Fourth Amendment walks into the fourth dimension.

The bartender says, “Why are you here?”

The Fourth Amendment replies, “You’re going to need probable cause to ask me that.”

In some of my earlier articles and videos, I referred to a “Fourth Amendment search” without stopping to explain what that phrase means. Before we travel any farther through space-time, let’s fix that.

What is a Fourth Amendment search?

The seriousness of losing your car keys notwithstanding, in constitutional law, “search” is a legal term, not simply a description of someone looking for something.

Generally speaking, government intruding upon a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy may be considered a Fourth Amendment search. So, if they’re looking for your car keys, that could be a search.

It may also occur when the government physically intrudes upon a constitutionally protected person, house, paper, or effect for the purpose of obtaining information. Those ideas come from cases such as Katz v. United States and United States v. Jones, summarized by the Library of Congress in its discussions of the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test and current search-and-seizure doctrine.

In plain English: when the government examines somewhere or something in which you have legally recognized privacy or property interests, the Fourth Amendment may enter the conversation.

That does not automatically mean the search was unconstitutional.

The next question is whether it was reasonable. A valid warrant ordinarily requires probable cause and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. There are also established exceptions to the warrant requirement, because constitutional law (like any self-respecting bureaucracy) apparently dislikes simple answers almost as much as time travel dislikes consistent movie plots.

It doesn’t mean police need a warrant for literally everything. The big question is whether you had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the place or thing being searched. Your bedroom: probably so. The trash you left at the curb: courts have generally said probably not so. Your phone: increasingly, yes, and increasingly protected, but the details vary by circumstance and are still evolving. In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court generally required a warrant before police search a phone seized during an arrest, subject to recognized exceptions. But I’m a forensic examiner, not a lawyer, so the details are for your counsel, not for me.

What is the Fourth Dimension?

Well, by and large, it’s considered to be Time – at least that’s what Einstein thought when he talked about spacetime, though it was his former math professor that coined the term. No, spacetime is not when you’re binge-watching old episodes of Friends. It’s the usual three dimensions plus time, all tied up with a bright blue-shifted bow.

Of course, we know how to move through the first three dimensions. But surely, you’ve seen the protestors chanting about being able to use that fourth one:

“What do we want?”

“Time Travel!”

“When do we want it?”

“It’s irrelevant!”

What does time have to do with it?

Quite a lot, actually. Time can determine when a search began, how long it lasted, whether consent was still in effect, and whether an emergency or the scope of a warrant justified what happened next.

I once worked on a case in which someone apparently wished time travel were real and tried to simulate it. He set his computer’s clock backward and then created a demand document that appeared to predate the action the demand might have prompted. The clock cooperated but the rest of the forensic evidence was less accommodating. As it turns out, changing the time displayed by a computer is easier than changing the history recorded around it.

Modern technology makes the relationship even more interesting. A single piece of location information may disclose very little. A long history of location information can reveal a detailed portrait of a person’s movements and associations. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court treated historical cell-site location records as a distinctive privacy concern.

One point in space (or space-time) is a dot: create enough dots across time and you might have an unwitting biography.

Is it “time to get rid of the stuff”?

No. Let’s stop the clock right there.

Learning that a search may occur is not a cue to delete, conceal, destroy, alter, or toss anything into a conveniently available volcano. Doing so with the intent to interfere with an investigation can create serious, separate legal problems. Federal law, for example, expressly addresses the destruction, alteration, or concealment of records intended to obstruct certain federal matters. See 18 U.S.C. § 1519.

The better uses of time are less cinematic: pause before reacting, preserve potentially relevant information, pay attention to what is being requested and what is actually authorized.

It’s a very good idea to avoid physically interfering with officials.

And, when the situation is real rather than hypothetical, consider contacting a qualified lawyer.

Calling a lawyer is not an admission of wrongdoing. It is like calling the right mechanic when the warning light comes on in your time machine (well after the warranty expired). You may hope the problem is nothing but spinning the dial back and forth between dinosaurs and intergalactic civilization, but that is not a diagnostic procedure.

What if we could go back in time?

A constitutional time traveler would need more than one stop.

First, Philadelphia in 1787, where the Constitution was drafted. Then, the First Congress in 1789, where James Madison introduced proposed amendments. Finally, 1791, when ten amendments were ratified as the Bill of Rights.

The National Archives’ history of the Bill of Rights explains that the demand for explicit protections grew out of public concern about the new federal government’s power. The Fourth Amendment’s language reflects a desire to protect people against unreasonable searches and seizures and to prevent warrants from becoming open-ended permission slips.

If we could visit the debate, we might warn the participants:

Someday, people will carry their papers, correspondence, location history, financial information, calendars, and several thousand pictures of their pets and dinners – and their pets’ dinners – inside a handheld glowing rectangle.

After a long silence, someone would probably ask, “How did they fit people inside that little box?” Someone else would ask, “What is a selfie?” Benjamin Franklin would somehow already have an account and would be publishing the source code in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

The Fourth Amendment is not only for people accused of crimes

Privacy is not evidence of guilt. People close curtains without committing felonies. They use passwords without planning conspiracies. They close bathroom doors for reasons the Framers wisely left out of the constitutional text.

The Fourth Amendment matters because ordinary people generate extraordinary amounts of personal information. It establishes boundaries between individual life and government power. Those boundaries matter whether a person is guilty, innocent, mistakenly identified, merely nearby, or simply living a life that does not need to become public property.

Still, the Fourth Amendment is not a magical force field, and unlike time travel, it does not answer every question in advance. Courts still have to apply ideas such as reasonableness, probable cause, and particularity to the facts in front of them.

The lesson from the fourth dimension

We cannot return to yesterday and make a different decision. Yet. Similarly, we still can’t fast-forward through a difficult encounter. And importantly, we cannot travel to 1791 and ask Madison whether “papers and effects” includes cloud backups.

For now, understanding what a Fourth Amendment search means is useful enough. Technology records over time, and constitutional rights are easier to use when we understand them before anurgent occasion arises.

The Constitution, although written with a quill, still has something to say about the cloud.

So … if you had a working time machine and one stop, would you watch the Constitution get drafted, warn yourself about that time you made a really bad decision, or make a suspiciously well-timed investment? I’d like to know.

This article is for general educational discussion and is not legal advice. Fourth Amendment questions are highly fact-specific, and applicable rules may vary by jurisdiction.

Steve Burgess is a digital forensics expert witness with more than 40 years of experience and over 20,000 devices and digital media examined. He is the principal of Burgess Forensics, founded in 1985.

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