The comment I was responding to implied the Supreme Court &quot;interpreted&quot; the Constitution to undermine privacy rights. But in fact the opposite has happened: it has inserted privacy rights into the document far beyond what is in the text.<p>As to your point: the 4th amendment clearly does protect a narrow form of privacy: freedom from government trespass to property. But look at the text: it&#x27;s clearly a targeted, specific, protection. In contrast, look at the broad language of the first amendment: freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. The framers used broad language when that&#x27;s what they meant.<p>And it&#x27;s not like private communication is such a novel concept they had no reason to even contemplate it. People tend to think of the cloud and encryption as <i>sui generis</i> but the underlying concepts are not. People in 1776 communicated extensively about sensitive matters by letter and in person. Heck, sometimes they even wrote coded messages! They trusted sensitive business and financial information to accountants, lawyers, merchants, bankers, etc.<p>And if you think about it, if there was some sphere of private communication that the framers intended to protect even from the reach of a warrant, they could have done so even without the existence of encryption! Instead of saying that the government can search your &quot;papers&quot; with a warrant, the 4th amendment could say that the government can never search your papers. Again, it&#x27;s not like the idea of private communication was novel to them.