It was inconvenient so they eroded it.
When it came to the black panthers they took away both the 2nd and the 4th.
Notice the implication that it was reasonable to censor mail going to soldiers outside the country, (in WWII) but not inside the US.
"I get a letter from my wife that says, “It's very difficult writing because I feel that the _____ is looking over my shoulder." And where the word was, there is a splotch made with ink eradicator.
So I went down to the bureau, and I said, “You're not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don't like it. You can look at it, but you're not supposed to take anything out."
They said, “Don't be ridiculous. Do you think that's the way censors work - with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors."
I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, “Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?" She writes back, “No, I didn't use ink eradicator in my
letter, it must have been the____ and there's a hole cut out of the paper"
"I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, “Well, where's all the stuff?"
I said, “What stuff?"
She said, “Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry.”
I said, “Wait a minute - that was a list?"
She said, “Yes."
"That was a code", I said. "They thought it was a code - litharge, glycerine, etc."
Feynman's story of how he didn't get drafted is pretty well known.
He also tells some stories about how clueless the military was, because they had no concept of nuclear physics at that time, which would be expected.
Like, they didn't realize neutrons that go through water are much more dangerous.
When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable.
Dying from anthrax is a lot less convenient than having record of every letter a person sent or received dry-rotting in a data warehouse somewhere.
When someone's using the roads to travel to kill people, knowing who travelled to whom to trace them to the source is suddenly very reasonable.
No wait, that's insane, we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time.
Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?
However, cellphones in particular do require the cellphone network to track at least which cell they're in in order to work, so in practice controlling a cellphone network gives you a pretty good idea of where all the subscribers are.
This is a big problem, and we need to figure out how to stop it if we are to enjoy the sort of freedom from government surveillance that people everywhere enjoyed since the Paleolithic until about 01998. The 20th-century results of giving too much power to governments are not promising.
"Reasonable" changes over time, with available technology, and with the tolerance of the public. People don't much care for "We could've stopped that murder / caught that murderer, but we didn't use the resources available."
If there's a murder on a street corner, do we expect the cops to not pull camera records from every nearby store with an outward-facing camera?
Utility and traffic light poles have cameras and license plate scanners that can capture up to 5000 plates/sec, even in smaller suburban areas, at an increasingly alarming rate.
EZ Pass and similar are scanned in lots of places that aren't toll plazas — at least that is possibly agreed to via a terms of use.
I was on a jury where the police were able to track down a hit and run driver who killed a teenager within about 45 minutes due to red light cameras.
Torture is a good example.
Mike Baker talks about why it was pointless for the CIA to torture someone and why when they train people how to handle being capture, they tell them to tell the truth with a little information redacted.
Not to mention, a trove of communication like this is a major risk to every citizen: it can leak, it can stolen, it can be used by corrupt agents to blackmail or otherwise coerce most people, especially in the age of sexting, dick pics, etc.
The Penn family was trying to buy their way out of having their American land-holdings taxed by offering to pay mercenaries to protect the Colony (in a single lump sum). Franklin was arguing the Colony should assert its sovereign right to tax the family.
The "essential liberty" in question was the liberty of a government to levy tax as it saw fit to provide for a common defence.