At a technology conference in Portland, Oregon, on Friday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he will introduce legislation to ban bulk electronic surveillance, arguing it should be protected as a constitutional right under the Fourth Amendment, according to The Associated Press.

"If you would defend a society built on the principle of individual liberty, you need to recognize that you can no longer rely on the fact that mass surveillance is hard. Folks, in the 21st century, mass surveillance is easy," Wyden said.

Wyden, who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been a staunch critic of the U.S. government's surveillance of Americans, even prior to the disclosures of Edward Snowden, calling for revised rules for intelligence agencies and an end to bulk warrantless surveillance. 

The disclosures by Snowden revealed the NSA was collecting and storing the "to and from" records of nearly every American landline telephone call under a program that searched the data for connections to terrorist plots abroad.

In an opinion piece in The New York Times in November 2013, Wyden, joined by Senators Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-NM, wrote, "The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization."

Wyden's legislation would challenge the so-called Third Party Doctrine, which "holds that citizens' information in the hands of third, like phone companies, becomes business records and is not subject to the same rigorous search-warrant process as other personal effects."

Federal courts have ruled in the past that commercial records are business records and therefore not constitutionally protected.

Wyden argued that that information should be protected by the Fourth Amendment, which requires police to obtain warrants to search people's houses, papers, property and pockets.

It is an understanding shared by the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in its unanimous ruling in Riley v. California in June 2014, ruled that police need a warrant to search the cellphones of the people they arrest.  

"The task before us is to figure out how to ensure these principles are upheld in the digital world," Wyden said. "The same protections that apply to your personal papers, conversations and correspondence in the physical world must, by default, protect your privacy in the online world."