[Terr_]

Reducto ad absurdum:

"I've got a warrant to search these premises for a kidnapped child. What's inside that big crate with the air holes?"

"Nice try, officer, but those are postcards to my business associates, which makes it a big crate of correspondence."

---

If you prefer, substitute the child/crate with cash, drugs, weapons, letter-bombs...

[qwerty456127]

Nice try, officer, people advocating against privacy and Internet freedom always use child protection as their banners but start abusing the anti-privacy facilities for whatever else they want (and that's rarely about children) as soon as they manage to establish them.

What I mean is it's Ok for an officer with a search warrant to look inside a big crate but if they actually find letters there it's not Ok to read them without the consent of the recipient or the author.

[PeterisP]

There are very many cases in which both a 21st century and 18th century person would agree that it's reasonable for an officer with a search warrant to read through a box of letters without the accused recipient's consent; conspiracies to commit fraud justify reading your archive of business correspondence and using it as evidence in court; murders done for relationship reasons justify reading your archive of love letters and using them as evidence in court.

[UncleEntity]

It says so right in the 4th amendment "...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."

A warrant to search "your archive of business correspondence" or "your archive of love letters" is fine, reading those things while serving a warrant for your neighbors' stolen cat, Fluffy, not so much.

[Terr_]

> A warrant to search "your archive of business correspondence" or "your archive of love letters" is fine

But that's not what qwerty456127 proposed. They proposed an "absolute" right to secrecy of all correspondence.

In other words, you could catch a murderer covered in blood and you would be impossible to ever get legal permission to open the sealed envelope marked "Payment For The Job" that was in their back-pocket.

[Terr_]

> Nice try, officer, people advocating against privacy and Internet freedom always use child protection

Oh get off your goddamn high-horse already:

1. I explicitly told you it was reductio ad absurdum.

2. I lampshaded it with a silly "crate with air-holes."

3. I outright told you to pick some other scenario if you wished in the final paragraph.

> if they actually find letters there it's not Ok to read them

Hey, didn't you read the final sentence of my post? This isn't actually about giant crates with air-holes, you know. It's about the problems of asserting an utterly inviolable right which is also fundamentally impossible to validate.

Let me put it this way: Your search warrant is to check the premises for threatened blackmail photos, the stolen military bomb plans, and illicit cash payoffs. The letter-envelope is noticeably thicker than normal and crinkles.

What happens?