When the search warrant is for you... Strangers with guns and badges unfolded your life, page by page, and took notes October 5, 1989 The police may come at night, or early in the morning. They can come at your home, or your office, or both at once. They will come with a piece of paper in their hands and guns on their hips and they will leave with all the most secret things in your life. The piece of paper signed by a former prosecutor lets them read all the entries in your checkbook, and find out how much you spent for the most private purchase of your life. It lets them take away the stack of 20-year-old love letters to read down at the station. They get to take away the secret thing you keep folded down at the bottom of your jewel box. If you keep a journal or a diary, they can read it. They will know how you felt at your most vulnerable moments. They will read the part about what it was like when you quit drinking, or what you wanted to say that time she left you. They can read your weight chart on the inside of the door to the medicine chest, and copy down every name in your address book. They can take away the disks from your computer. At your office they can read your personnel file, and probably a hundred more, if they want to. They can go through your desk drawers and bookshelf and brief case. They can read whatever they find. And once they have done this the police will own your secrets forever. It doesn't matter if they ever bring a charge against you, or if another judge someday says their search was "over-broad." You might even sue them and you might even win, although that almost never happens. But nothing you do can ever change the fact that strangers with guns and badges unfolded your life, page by page, and took notes. You can't unring a bell or put the smoke back in a camp fire. You can't give back privacy once you've taken it away, and you can't make restitution for secrets that you've stolen. Probably you know by now that they've done all that to my friend Satch Carlson. Maybe you can guess how it makes me feel. I suppose he is suspected of terrible crimes, and I don't know if he did them. It may turn out that all this searching was for good cause and all the reasons were above-board and honorable. Maybe. When I examine my feelings about what's happening, I realize that I have seldom thought about what it means when policemen come knocking with their search warrants. It mostly doesn't happen in my neighborhood, or to my friends. It is uncommon in white collar offices or yuppified condo units. This happens more often to poor people, and people of color8 It is usually far from my mind. It is much closer now.