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.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.Why this has become the government’s default practice is clear. A physical search is cumbersome and expensive; it requires logistics, timing and staffing. And if a homeowner challenges it, the investigation could slow down.A digital search through service providers, by contrast, is a routine desk job. The Department of Justice uses a Legal Process Generator to churn out demands and boilerplate NDOs. Once a warrant is approved, the government sends it to the service provider with the gag order and waits for the zip file to arrive. The founders of our nation intended any secret search by the government to be an extraordinary event, justified only by extraordinary circumstances, approved by a judge, and with the fact of the search eventually brought to light. Today, however, the surreptitious intrusion has become quite normal, even in the most routine law enforcement investigations. 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.The standard justification for this secrecy is that electronic evidence is perishable. Investigators argue that notification would trigger a flurry of deletions. In reality, law enforcement already has the power to require providers to preserve data while police seek a warrant. In any event, it is much easier as a practical matter to burn a paper ledger in a fireplace than it is to scrub data replicated across industrial-scale servers.We have seen this pattern of overreach before. The American Revolution was fueled by a rejection of general warrants and writs of assistance. These tools gave the British Crown sweeping power to search private places and coerce assistance without restraint. The founders insisted that search power be bounded and visible. A search you learn about can be tested in court. A search kept secret can drift beyond challenge altogether, which tempts abuse.Congress now has the chance to restore that vision through the NDO Fairness Act. This bill curbs the abuse of gag orders by requiring judicial findings of necessity, imposing strict time limits and allowing service providers to challenge improper orders. The bill is well-vetted. It has passed the House of Representatives twice since 2021 and is now under serious consideration in both chambers.We cannot allow the modern necessity of the cloud to become a loophole for unreviewable searches. The NDO Fairness Act will allow the government to do its job and will ensure that secrecy is the exception once again.