"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution PING!
Pinging Dayglored, ThunderSleeps, Shadow Ace for their tech lists for more government snooping over reach.
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We now live in a nation with a Constitution that means no more than toilet paper...
This is a textbook example of a slippery slope. While typical content and user presentation schemes may vary, there really is not much technical difference between various communications methods. If you look at email, texts, snapchat, instagram, twitter, YouTube, other social media sites, even forums like FR here with private messaging... Fundamentally they all just exchange digital data (text, still imagery, audio/video) in a "store and forward" distribution scheme with the data stored remotely on third-party servers. Most have some way for the user to control who has access to the content. Even voicemail is just digitized audio.
So if you're going to allow the government access to any one of these formats of data, there is no real difference and you are giving them access to it all. They may only be looking for access to email for now. But then the case will be made at some point to allow similar access one or more, or all, of the other forms. Because fundamentally there is no difference - it's just packaging and presentation.