Comment Re:Slippery Slope (Score 1) 304
Border agents have been able to conduct searches of persons and their effects entering the country since the first Congress in 1789.
First, searches of their persons and effects does not mean reading and making a copy of their letters and books. It means looking in the trunk and verifying that it is just letters and books.
Second, there were no border agents in 1789. You could walk or swim into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico freely for (statistically) most our nation's history. The first border patrols began in the 1920s to restrict immigration from certain countries. There were laws in the late 1700s regarding import of *cargo*, and that was handled by the folks who ran each individual port, but again, that's not the same thing as searching a passenger's person and making copies of their letters. Those laws applied only to identifying goods that were likely intended for sale, for tax policy/import duty reasons.
This bastardization of border policy to include searching the contents of people's papers and devices is a late 1900s perversion of the Constitution.
So no, pretty much everything you said is wrong.