If they don't, they can still do that, but anything they find will likely not be usable in court and you'll have a straightforward civil rights case.

However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.

Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.

What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?

In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.

Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.

[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.

[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.

>I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read

I guess I'd ask if you're really sure about that as a threat model? The fact is that such things are really really rare, particularly for anything white collar-ish. They get press precisely because they're unicorns. The "lawful" bit as well, one of the whole things here is that it's, at best, very dubiously lawful at all; they've been able to skirt that question so far via keeping it all secret and trying to hide from individual suit. Can't do that if a warrant from a local magistrate judge is needed and a private residence is raided though.

In contrast "you can beat the rap but not the ride" seems less dramatic but a lot more common, and in particular more than actual jail all the little ways the government has tried to fuck with people (like putting them on travel lists) that are opaque and much more difficult to even prove are the result of an organized scheme. I'm personally more worried in the near future about "chilling effects at a scale", not hundreds of activists in gulags but millions of people who get pressure in terms of financials or tax investigations or pressure on employers or always getting pulled in the security lines and on and on, and then some sizable fraction change their behavior as a result. It feels more concretely productive and practical to focus on making sure the government would have trouble both scaling and hiding unconstitutional behavior.

Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.

I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.