Amendment guarantees against warrantless searches and seizures by the national security state.

For their part, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Davis argued in court that the government's request was "routine."

Davis told the court, "this is a standard--as this court knows well--investigative measure used in criminal investigations every day of the year all over the country."

As the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers escalates, prosecutions and threats of the same have focused journalists and corporate watchdogs in their gunsights.

Secrecy News disclosed last week that former National Security Agency official Thomas A. Drake, charged last year "with unauthorized retention of classified information about controversial NSA programs, should not be allowed to argue in court that overclassification is widespread or that he was engaged in whistleblowing in the public interest."

According to federal prosecutors, whileGreenberg. "For this, there's only one similar example. It's like the Enron emails."

This was no idle threat. Back in January, Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer, a former executive with Switzerland's Bank Julius Baer turned over two CDs to Assange at a London press conference.

WikiLeaks first brush with notoriety, readers will recall, came in 2008 when a federal district court judge in San Francisco first clamped down and then rescinded an order that would have shuttered the web site over their release of highly-compromising internal Baer documents; files which revealed secret trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.

The next Baer disclosures are reportedly chock-a-block with new information on tax dodges by "about 40 politicians along with business people, multinational conglomerates and figures from the art world,"