[rayiner]

The 4th amendment was not a response to British actions designed to root out dissent. It was a response to British actions designed to root out people bypassing customs tariffs.

In talking about intent you're projecting onto the framers a broad conception of "privacy" that they did not have. You can't just ignore the text. If you're arguing something is encompassed by the spirit of the law, there must be some evidence of it in the text. It's not there. The text and the discussion at the time is consistent with a more narrow principle: the sanctity of one's home and person, not some broad overarching principle of privacy that attaches to information even when it's shared with potentially hundreds of third parties (how many engineers at Google have access to your email accounts?)

The framers didn't have phones, but they did have all sorts of stored records. Banking records, ledgers, commercial transaction records, shipping records, etc. You can't just ignore the fact that all these things existed, yet the founders made no mention of protecting information that was routinely and by its nature disclosed to other people.