No, of course we don't believe they would have written it that way today. But neither you nor me nor anyone else gets to make up what we think they'd have said. They didn't say it. They're dead. They can't change what the law says. But, guess what? We can.

The law as written provides the rules of the game. Nobody should get to cheat, not the government, not a citizen, not a business, just because someone can plausibly argue that if the law were rewritten today it'd be written differently.

If the claim is true that the law would be and should be written differently today, then: Rewrite. The. Law.

If you don't have enough public support for that, then you have no business imposing your view on your fellow citizens. If you do have enough public support, but Congress is being dysfunctional (this is usually the case today), then communicate with your congresspeople and/or try vote them out, and persuade your fellow citizens to do the same. Don't cheat at the game. Play it.

IMO it is tangibly different. Having yourself, your things, or your house searched in the 1700s is a much bigger inconvenience and invasion of privacy than a cellular provider noting your phone was in the general vicinity of an area. I don't think the spirit or intent of the amendment would apply in cases where there is no tangible impact to the individual being searched.

If we don't want the government to be able to do that, we should pass laws to that effect.

> Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them.

I suspect you're right--a bunch of high-IQ libertarian men who had just overthrown their government would write the 4th amendment differently if confronted with universal digital surveillance. But is that how we decide the legal effect of the constitution? We're stuck not only with what the founders actually wrote, but what they would have written if confronted with modern facts?

What are the parameters of this analysis? Do we assume the same James Madison--we have transported him into present day with his knowledge and thought processes intact and are simply presenting him with additional facts? Or do we assume a modern James Madison--the same kind of person today that James Madison was back then. And who decides what reincarnated James Madison would or would not have done--and why do we trust that this medium is correct?

I think it's simpler to say that the meaning of the constitution ends at what is written. What the founders intended is relevant to the extent we're trying to figure out what what they meant, at the time, by the words they used. But we won't go so far as to speculate about what the founders would have written if confronted with modern facts. We have people who can decide what to do about modern facts: they're called voters.

No, it doesn't. The person I'm responding to is using semantics to claim the 4th amendment didn't mention scope and therefore privacy against search is irrelevant. My point is that acting as though the constitution of the us is some infallible holy text leads society down a path with learned priests interpreting arcane texts (you are here). Instead of acting as a rational society and addressing a need for citizens to have privacy in a changing technological world.

Debating who the "we" is is losing the forest for the trees--we're wading into a conversation debating the power of a state or local municipality instead of looking at the actual issue where the federal government isn't protecting is citizens because "technically the slaveowners didn't say cell phone in their document".

> The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law.

But the Supremacy Clause says the Constitution overrides Virginia law.

If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.

Only when it's the way they want to rule.