These libertarians with their prattling on about freedom and rights. They can be so tiresome. Please stop with the high dudgeon!

Here’s an example of one such “freedom” person writing about open-ended search warrants: “Every one with this writ may be a tyrant; if this commission be legal, a tyrant in a legal manner also may control, imprison, or murder any one within the realm.”

Murder? Come on. That’s James Otis, overwrought about writs of assistance in 1761. Settle down, Jimmy-Boy. And what’s up with the archaic language?

Otis may have a more congenial modern successor in Naomi Brockwell of the Ludlow Institute, who recently narrated a pair of videos articulating the value of the Fourth Amendment and the comprehensive demerits of the “third-party doctrine.” The latter doctrine is an exception that swallows the rule in modern times. The Fourth Amendment, meant to secure us from various forms of government encroachment, doesn’t apply online.

These videos are fun. Yours truly makes an appearance (though you can hardly tell it’s me, thanks to my fuzzy laptop camera). The videos articulate well how our system of rights make us the longest surviving democracy in history. If we want it to survive, we must be vigilant about those rights. Good government isn’t a product of lucky happenstance or the honor of our leaders. Those things are nice, but the rights to say whatever we want in the public square and to say no at our front doors matter more.

Alas, our digital front doors are pretty wide open, in part because of the third-party doctrine. Even if you have agreements with your online service providers promising the security and privacy of your data, those agreements are null and void when government agents come calling. That makes no sense. Our legal system is founded on common law concepts like property and contract, but in this area errant Supreme Court doctrine says—poof, they’re gone.

That’s why Brockwell and the Ludlow Institute are putting in significant effort to promote the Surveillance Accountability Act, which was introduced in the US House last week. Ludlow’s SurveillanceAccountability.com website tells the story.

Of course, Congress cannot directly reverse errant Fourth Amendment doctrines like the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test and its child, the third-party doctrine. It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. But Congress can have some influence.

While the courts catch up—perhaps a little through the Chatrie case just argued in the Supreme Court—the Surveillance Accountability Act would establish rules that should spring from a proper interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.

Among other things, the bill would provide:

The government shall not access any data, metadata, or personal information held by a third party, including financial services providers, telecommunication service providers, internet service providers, cloud storage companies, or data brokers, without a valid warrant, regardless of whether the third party consents or cooperates.

That would nullify the third-party doctrine by statute.

The bill would restate the warrant requirement in the Fourth Amendment and also the plain view doctrine. That’s the sensible rule that government agents can take cognizance of things they have legally accessed. If entering a house to serve an arrest warrant on a suspected thief, for example, they see stolen goods in plain view on his coffee table, that’s fine for them to seize.

In some respects the bill would establish stronger rules than the Fourth Amendment requires. That’s something Congress can do!

The Surveillance Accountability Act is directionally consistent with the New Hampshire legislation I’ve written about recently. Rather than saying directly that the government can’t take people’s data from third parties without a warrant, New Hampshire’s House Bill 1436, the Common Law Privacy and Consumer Protection Act, would create a presumption in New Hampshire law that creates a bailment of that information.

Bailment is when someone takes possession of someone else’s property. The possessor has an obligation to the owner to care for it, and the owner doesn’t lose ownership rights.

Recognizing bailments would help establish that our private communications and data, held by service providers, are still ours. They are papers and effects in which we can make a constitutional claim, if we think they were wrongly seized and searched.

Directly through the Surveillance Accountability Act or indirectly through the Common Law Privacy and Consumer Protection Act, there are moves afoot to make the internet a constitutionally protected area. Brockwell’s short video series has nothing of the high dudgeon heard elsewhere about these issues. To the extent supporters of such legislation are overwrought or radical, they share that trait with the framers of our treasured Constitution.