Oh, my heaven's yes. I totally agree.
But, I'm going to take the conversation in a different direction by questioning the premise. Not yours, CCJ--the court's when it started down the path of privacy.
At the bottom, this is not my original idea. I read it somewhere several years ago. The author's analysis was to me so striking that I nearly dropped my coffee (code for good scotch) on my keyboard.
Today, one of the touch-stones of court analysis on the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) is privacy. Their analysis includes the question whether a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in this or that. If the court finds he does, the search--and whatever it discovered--may be invalidated and suppressed. One of the way's the courts analyze whether a person had a "reasonable" expectation of privacy is to examine whether "society" would recognize or agree with that "expectation of privacy."
Well that author I read several years ago pointed out something. The Fourth Amendment doesn't mention privacy; it mentions security. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."
By shifting the premise to privacy, the Supreme Court minimized the security angle, and granted itself large, new power. Think about it for a second. The supreme court declares that society does or does not consider a certain thing private. What does that really mean? It means the supreme court set itself up as mind-readers of each of 300 million members of America (society). And, that is on each privacy question that comes before the court on a search-and-seizure angle (and, probably the other angles, but I cannot say for sure.) My, my, my. What a herculean effort that must be. Why, we should all bow down and thank those justices for the massive time and mental concentration it must take to read all those minds. And, we cannot forget the federal circuit courts of appeal--they have to do the same thing every time a new privacy question comes before them.
Let me tell you how bad its gotten. Its gotten so bad, that after the initial privacy angle, the courts have declared that if you don't hide something from view or discovery by others, then you didn't consider it private--and it is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment. Yep. You cannot feel secure in your own mind by your own understanding of whether others will or won't snoop, look closer, etc. No, you have to actively hide something to prove your interest in keeping it private. Well, when you're in public with whichever possession, anyway.
Can it really be long before not drawing your curtains is declared that you had no expectation of privacy inside your house? No, no, no. You cannot rely on your trust in most of your fellow human beings not to stare in from the street. Nope. At some point, perhaps not far, failing to draw your curtains will be proof that you didn't mind government pressing their nose against your window.
Privacy is also a wedge, the camel's nose under the tent. And, a false, invented premise, at least when it comes to search-and-seizure.
Can anybody cite even one single supreme court case where the court analyzes a case based on security: the right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects?