These secret government investigations fly in the face of the Constitution

When the police raid a home during an investigation, the neighbors notice. Officers knock on the door, announce their presence, hand over a physical warrant and create a paper trail, including an inventory of seized items. This transparency is a constitutional safeguard.

Yet as our lives have migrated from mahogany desks and steel filing cabinets to the cloud, the knock that was expected to accompany every search has gone silent. Today, when the government wants to sift through your private papers, it doesn’t need to go through any door, let alone knock. Instead of presenting you with a warrant, it sends one to your email or cloud provider, compelling that provider to search for the evidence the government is interested in. The government also routinely uses a “nondisclosure order” (NDO) to gag the provider from telling you that your data has been examined and surrendered.

There is no opportunity for you or anyone else to object. Your digital life can be copied, reviewed and stored by the state while you remain none the wiser. These secret investigations fly in the face of the Fourth Amendment and its protections against unreasonable searches, because citizens cannot challenge intrusions they do not know occurred. This is a situation Congress should act to change.

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The scale of this quiet entry is immense. In the first half of 2025, the government gagged Meta in more than 77 percent of its 81,064 search requests, averaging more than 340 per day. Microsoft received more than 1,900 NDOs in that period. Others have reported much the same. Many of these gag orders had no expiration date, effectively silencing these companies from ever telling customers about the search of their data.

This practice has created a legal due process vacuum. When the state demands and holds your private papers in secret, you cannot ask a court to suppress evidence, order the return of privileged material or even find out what the government now knows about you. Any company forced to conduct a search for the government will likewise be unable to assert your rights for you or tell you about the investigation. The government gets the papers; the citizen gets a vacuum.

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By Bob Goodlatte and Richard Salgado

Bob Goodlatte is a former congressman from Virginia and a former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Richard Salgado teaches surveillance law at Stanford and Harvard law schools.