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The Constitution and Bill of Rights permit exceptions in exigent circumstances. The 4th and 5th amendments have long lines of cases that discuss these situations. The Watertown police raids did not constitute exigent circumstances. All they knew was that a lone bomber was somewhere in a 5 mile radius, so they decided to search all the houses. That's nuts. As I said on another thread, if the cops had information that a nuke was located in such a wide area, maybe a house to house search would be justified, but that was not the case here. What should have happened was that the cops went to the doors of each house, knocked and asked the person who answered if they had seen anything suspicious, while checking for signs that the person was in distress. If they wanted to physically search the inside of the house or the premises, they needed to ask, and not with the gun pointed at the homeowner, and not after frisking the occupants.

There were large bombs that killed lots of people in the anarchist and communist violence in the 1920s. I don't think the people who were dealing with that decided that the solution was to violate the rights of the law abiding citizens. This is not unique, only the response of law enforcement is new.

All they knew was that a lone bomber was somewhere in a 5 mile radius, ...

This is not all that they knew. I'm unsure of the series of events after the bombing, but Watertown police were undoubtedly very much aware of the carnage in Boston from televised news reports, also that a police officer had been killed on the MIT campus, and that a resident had phoned in concerning evidece of an injured trespasser. It's not like the only information that they had about some bomber was unexpectedly phoned in from an anonymous caller.

So with all due respect Defiant, you seem to be in denial of the series of tragic events which prompted Watertown police to react the way that they did.

As a side note, as I had mentioned in another post, Bill of Right's prohibitions on government powers did not apply to the states until the 14th Amendment was ratified.