What's not allowed is indiscriminate vacuuming of data for analysis to see if "crimes" have been committed.
I feel like police need to be very specific with what they are allowed to access.
Yes, search warrants generally limit themselves more than that, but a warrant is a warrant and the authorities can search anything they need to that's reasonably connected to what they have probable cause to suspect. How is your digital life any different from your physical life in that regard?
Police and other LE already have to go to a judge and be "very specific" to be able to search anywhere you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Actual police officers or detectives need to visit said house, spend time on-prem, collect, and analyze evidence. A single site can be accessed at a time.
Digital media are searched automatically, by hardware and processes, with many potential targets searched simultaneously and at vanishingly small cost.
Physical evidence and print media are far slower to access and assess than digital media are.
Physical evidence and print media have vastly lower data density than digital media do. Both temporal and spatial data resolution is far lower for the former. At the same time, provenance, integrity, and chain-of-possession over physical evidence media are also generally easier to ensure and assess, and both are generally less susceptible to either fabrication or modification.
(The point here isn't that physical media cannot be tampered with. It's that digital media can be tampered with absolutely no evidence of this on the media itself. Typically some external validation or integrity check is necessary. Digital media can be entirely fabricated, all the more so now with AI and generator technologies, or can be entirely destroyed without a trace.)
Digital media can be stored at volumes and for durations which would be utterly impossible with physical evidence.
A 1 TB storage device, which can fit on your pinkie nail, can hold the equivalent of ~200,000 books, roughly the size of a fairly substantial public library. The entire Library of Congress book collection, 140 million volumes, assuming 5 MB each, would fit in 700 TB of storage. With currently-available 20 TB drives, that's about 35 disks, which would fit within a few standard rack units (mostly depending on the size of disk you'd opted for). The total cost would be a few thousand dollars.
Digital media, particularly in the form of SaaS providers and Cloud storage, is an absolute trove of information on hundreds of millions or billions of people.
(NB. Correct me if I am wrong but in the case of Google, unless it's a search of Google's premises, it's not a warrant, it's a subpoena. Without being notified of a subpoena there's no opportunity for you to challenge it.)
https://ia804707.us.archive.org/10/items/gov.uscourts.cacd.8...
I’ve always been fascinated by red-teaming things, and a very curious person in general. For example, I took some advanced chemistry classes and wanted to look up how hard it would be to synthesize RDX one day.
I feel like that could be used against me in the wrong situation. My computer is full of things that only exist in my mind, and I feel like that’s too personal for something like a jury to handle.
If the police could hypothetically toss every house in the country twice a day and once on Sundays, that has precisely nothing to do with anything. So long as the only houses they DO toss are ones where a judge has reviewed the evidence, and determined that there is probable cause that tossing the house will turn up fruits or instrumentalities of a crime. Capability to do a thing has nothing to do with approval to do a thing under the law or ethics. I'm fully capable of being a (very bad) male prostitute, but I refrain from doing that for many obvious moral and legal reasons.
You have a lot more faith than I do. I'd bet it's a lot more like a rubber stamp with basically zero review, assuming they bother with warrants at all (https://petapixel.com/2022/07/27/googles-nest-will-provide-d... https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/new-records-det... https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-03-24... https://experiencedcriminallawyers.com/what-private-informat...)
I think that actual process is that judge agrees to anything cops ask for, not evidence review is going on.
Anyone would go crazy with being spied on like that, it's worse than what the Stasi could ever do. And of course that notebook would be a treasure trove way more sensitive than a letter you would have written.
It twists things.
e.g. search engine choices wrt Google being scrutinised on a possible monopoly position.