&gt; Not to protect citizens&#x27; privacy from government snooping without probable cause?<p>&gt; The fact that you can &quot;conduct criminal activity in the privacy of your own home&quot; is a side effect, not a design goal, of the principle that a free society is worth the risk of letting a few criminals slip through the cracks.<p>You can&#x27;t really separate the two ideas. If you look hard enough, every single person is a criminal. That&#x27;s why we can&#x27;t have total surveillance. We would end up with either total prosecution or, more likely, selective prosecution by those in power silencing the dissidents.<p>So, actually, grandparent post has it &quot;more&quot; correct. The goal is to let everyone be a criminal (since we all are in some way other) and the means to that goal is preventing &quot;government snooping without probable cause&quot;.