Ahem, have you forgotten about the NSA spying on US citizens? Every government covets that power. It's a fantasy to assume they don't.
But of course you need paid access to Lexus Nexus to look any of that up because while 'case law' is the law of the land and cases records are 'public' you have no way to, you know, access it or the information from all those 'public' cases they are involved in without paying big $$$. So the average person has no way to get exposed to how things really operate and instead go off some Constitutional and televisions crime drama 'ideals' that we all want reality to look like. It was really interesting spending hours going through those cases in the law library when I had 'free' (just trade a day of your life) access to it.