The government must be allowed to intrude on even such fundamental interests as the rights to travel, to privacy, and to be left alone. The appropriate point of balance between these protections for the individual and the necessity of government intrusion has traditionally been the requirement of individualized suspicion. The U.S. Supreme Court has found adequate justification for dispensing with this requirement in only two instances, administrative searches and border area checkpoints. An analysis of the use of sobriety checkpoints in terms of the Court's reasonableness criteria detailed in Camara v. Municipal Court, which addressed municipal housing inspections, indicates that such checkpoints are unreasonable intrusions under the fourth amendment. They have no history of public or judicial acceptance, are focused on the individual, and tend to be seen as criminal investigations. Moreover, sobriety checkpoints involve a significantly greater degree of intrusion than that used at permanent border area checkpoints. Unlike border checkpoints, the effectiveness of sobriety checkpoints has not been proven empirically, either in terms of arrests or deterrence. The article includes 235 footnotes.