It upsets me that we don't learn from what happened in the US and just repeating history while everyone else is making progress on theses particular issues.
I might have realized that laptops weren't in common use at the time. I remember his secretary Fawn Hall smuggled documents out in her boots for him. How old school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawn_Hall
The purpose of America is not to make cops' jobs as easy as possible.
Why not make cops jobs as easy as possible?
The down side is that public opinion and policy making are constantly changing. A person who is constantly monitored needs to worry that any activity they take part in today, regardless of how legal/acceptable, may become unacceptable tomorrow. Take, for example, boycotting by Canadian citizens of goods made in Israeli settlements. A year ago one may have disagreed with the sentiment, but it certainly wouldn't have seemed illegal. Today the Canadian government is threatening to bring these citizens up on hate crime charges. (As an aside I am not deeply familiar with this particular issue and am using it only as and example and as described at face value. Its entirely possible that some people have committed hate crimes.)
The Canadian government certainly already has files on some, if not all, of the biggest actors in this movement.
In a truly democratic society we need to tolerate and even bolster the voice of dissent. We claim to value our (nearly) unlimited freedom of speech. But a person who needs to worry that all of their words are recorded and can be used out of context later to condemn them will be less likely to voice their dissent. That loss of freedom is the cost of making police job's as easy as possible.
Don't forget the issue of abuse of surveillance data- see for example NSA and CIA analysts using our databases to stalk their exes, or cops using their legally-acquired surveillance powers in illegal ways to suppress dissent.
And there's another facet that I don't hear discussed enough- Take, for example, the crime of speeding. What if speeding resulted in immediate traffic fines, 100% of the time, with perfect enforcement. Is that how we want it to work? Speeding is always possibile, and always punishable? Or is it actually better to live in a world where speeding carries the risk of traffic fines?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_o...
Cops are people too, and sometimes people are assholes. Really, really big assholes. This is why we have rules instead of a police state. Well, had.
If I understand you correctly, you are implying that we should make the argument that searching everything will result in less effective law enforcement because there will be so much more data that we will miss more things.
If this were true, then it would be an excellent argument -- rather like the argument against using torture in interrogations because it actually does a WORSE job of getting people to tell you (true) information than other techniques. This is in addition to the argument against torture that claims that torture is simply evil and we shouldn't be doing it.
I think that invading everyone's privacy without a warrant and without any good REASON to suspect an individual ("reasonable and articulable suspicion") is simply evil and we shouldn't be doing it. But I do NOT also believe that invading everyone's privacy will reduce the number of criminals caught. I actually think it would be quite effective at catching criminals. The massive amount of data available would be create more work, but investigators would spend time only on people they had vague inarticulable reasons to suspect, and this would be quite efficient. For instance, if you focused just on black males age 17-29 and combed through every email or electronic communication they had ever made, I am sure you could find tens of thousands of felonies -- but such a process would be profoundly unfair. In addition, you can use computers to search through the giant haystacks very efficiently.
I find this an excellent lens to examine issues like this.
I am arguing it won't.
What it does is it makes it easier for the government to manufacture bad guys* to then continue manipulating the public.
[*] How is that done? Gov. agency finds patsy; Gov. agency entraps patsy; Gov. agency blames patsy, says he is a terrorist, arrests/kills/tortures patsy, gets confession, passes new legislation, all in a day's work. If not a patsy, an ally disguised as "enemy".
They had enough warning that he was going to be going through customs to decide whether to grab the laptop when he arrived in the country or when he left it, opting for the latter, so yes, they would have had plenty of time to apply for a warrant if they thought they needed one up-front.
All it said was that he was selling accelerometers, which could be used in a variety of things (i.e. autonomous vehicles, commercial aircraft, etc.):
The defendant was accused of unlawfully selling Q-Flex Accelerometers—models QA-2000-10, QA-2000-20, and QA-3000
There was no statement of intent (in the article at least), so saying these were to be used for weapons seems a bit premature.