From Justice Robert's majority opinion of Riley v California:

    Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding
    generation’s response to the reviled “general warrants” and “writs
    of assistance” of the colonial era, which allowed British officers
    to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of
    criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the
    driving forces behind the Revolution itself. In 1761, the patriot
    James Otis delivered a speech in Boston denouncing the use of writs
    of assistance. A young John Adams was there, and he would later write
    that “[e]very man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away,
    as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.” [...]
    According to Adams, Otis’s speech was “the first scene of the first
    act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and
    there the child Independence was born.”