> I don't love the grounds of the electronic device search here but this was not random or arbitrary.
The way modern day totalitarianism (at all levels of it) works is operating through existing legal and bureaucratic systems to make your authoritarianism seem "legal and within reason."
It's so much easier to enrage people if you do something _completely randomly_, but if you put "oh this is legal" behind it, people calm down quite a bit.
Not to drag you in this, but your comment is an example of that. And ignoring the ego for a second here, I've definitely seen myself care "less" when something is legal if I wasn't paying attention to it.
Remember that this isn't really new. Sham courts, sham procedures, sham justice has been the cornerstone of every fascist, dictator, authoritarian in the past.
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The rest of the comment isn't really relevant here, but I'm going to type it out just because someone might find it interesting.
We can see this type of "sham procedure" in social media moderation, in workplace behavior moderation, etc. Any person in power can, very easily, use rules, codes of conduct, policies, etc to control and set the tone of any interaction. Funnily enough, that power is usually reported as designed to protect the people with less power, but it's nearly always used to exert authority on people with less power.