Treating people like potential suspects isn't a "search" of their "persons" (bodies), "houses, papers, and effects." How would it even work if police needed a warrant to even consider someone as a suspect and investigate them?
You understand "being secure in your person" is not merely "I don't get physically touched", right? If I stalked you every day without ever touching you, you wouldn't feel so secure in your person, would you? If I was a police officer, you still wouldn't feel so secure, would you? If you knew I was doing this remotely instead of in-person, by monitoring you over video cameras across the city and tracking all your moves with your own GPS devices, you surely wouldn't feel so secure, would you?
People (maybe not you, but most humans) feel threatened when all their moves are being tracked. There's an implicit threat of physical harm even if it hasn't occurred thus far. Not to mention there's also the risk of a bad actor (read: including law enforcement insider) stealing your tracking data that was supposedly only ever being used for good. It's a real threat to your security, and you have a right to be secure. If another person is going to threaten a free person's security, they sure as hell need both the legal authority and reasonable suspicion of a crime. That is the amendment.
Where to draw the line for "reasonable" here can vary somewhat, but I think most people would agree that if you have 3 people all in close proximity to a crime, you could justify having reasonable suspicion of each individual of being involved. If you have a hundred people walking in a half-mile radius, you clearly don't. Idk where the line exactly is, and circumstances can affect things, but somewhere between those seems like a reasonable place to start.
You used the word "feel" four times in your post, but it appears zero times in the fourth amendment:
> "The right of the people [1] to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, [2] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, 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."
The clause labeled [2] limits the scope of the clause labeled [1]. It's not a free-floating right to "feel secure" against anything--people following you, etc. It's a right "to be secure in [your] person" "against" a specific intrusion: "unreasonable searches and seizures."
If it said: "you have a right not to be mauled by lions," that wouldn't mean you have a right not to be eaten by hippos. Much less that you have a right not to "feel" threatened by the prospect of being eaten by hippos.
> You used the word "feel" four times in your post, but it appears zero times in the fourth amendment. The clause labeled [2] limits the scope of the clause labeled [1]. It's not a free-floating right to "feel secure" against anything--people following you, etc. It's a right "to be secure in [your] person" "against" a specific intrusion: "unreasonable searches and seizures."
It the word "feel" distracted you from the underlying point.
First: "being secure in your person" does mean to include feelings as well as actual harm (“protected from... danger” as well as "free from fear"). See [1] for example. I am approximately 99% sure the authors of that amendment would have felt that government officials following them around would have directly violated that amendment, and I would be shocked to hear you're actually arguing otherwise. (Are you?)
Second: you're either misunderstanding or completely ignoring the actual physical danger here. Again, I refer you to my previous question, which you did not address: if I was stalking you 24/7, would you say you ARE secure in your person/effects/etc.? If other people claimed you ARE secure, would you agree with them? Would it change if I was a police officer? Are you seriously going to argue that my stalking is only impacting your feelings regarding your security, not your actual security?
I'm focusing on the word "feel" because it illustrates that you're reading words and ideas into the sentence that aren't there.
"Be[ing] secure in your person" doesn't encompass feelings. The text of the fourth amendment is objective. It refers to objective actions. It's not talking about people's subjective "feelings" about actions.
Your argument doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Let's say the fourth amendment does cover how people feel about government action. Then how do we decide whether people "feel" threatened by geofencing warrants? Do we take a poll? I suspect if you did take a poll, you'd find that most people trust law enforcement and don't "feel" threatened by the police using geofencing warrants to catch bank robbers.
You're also overlooking the rest of the text. The amendment doesn't end at "be secure." It doesn't guarantee being secure--much less feeling secure--from an entire universe of things. The sentence is limited to security "against" two specific things: "unreasonable searches and seizures." It doesn't say anything about the government investigating you or following you around using data available from somewhere else.
We don't have to guess at what "the authors of [the] amendment would have felt." They wrote down what they meant! When they mean to be broad and general, they used broad and general words. The first amendment says: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." That's very broad! If the first amendment said "abridging the freedom of speech to publish books" that would be narrower.
