Yep, remember the old George Orwell quote from 1984:-

  "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

The future has more tall buildings than he might have imagined but it's going to be just as crap.

That's legally been the case for decades. Anything in the public view is exempt from whatever privacy rights we have left, and has been for quite some time.

That's not true, while technically true in a legal sense, practically we had privacy via anonymity in the masses. It took a large amount of effort to track a single person.

Of course governments and bussiness don't want this to change because they can take advantage of this with the new technology.

But it doesn't mean that the previous laws are appropriate for today, nor imo should any legal precedents apply any more because the situation has significantly changed.

>That's not true, while technically true in a legal sense,

That is true in a legal sense. That's why I put "legally" at the beginning.

The point is there are no legal hurdles to overcome for the government. These are the most difficult and this is absolutely true. Legally we have very little if any privacy in public. The only hurdles are technological ones, which automate the inspection of people in public areas. (i.e. facial recognition cameras).

Police can spy on your in your own home legally, if you leave a window open, because you just made that part of your home public. They'll setup across your yard and watch you with telescopic lenses. Police also spy on people in their own homes using IR and thermal cameras, which cannot be defeated easily, and this crosses (leaps) the boundary of your home being private. Apparently the thermal radiation emitted is now public space. I remember this in court, but don't remember the outcome.

I suspect though that when these laws were made, lawmakers didn't anticipate the ease and scope of which automation could make spying. Maybe they'll reconsider, but the police departments have a lot of sway over lawmakers, so I seriously doubt it.

Have no doubt though, police aren't interested in your privacy, they are interested in arrest counts. Privacy laws are an inconvenient burden to their jobs and they will use any methods they can think of to circumvent your privacy rights and argue technicalities in court. They will usually win.

Of course, all of this was enabled with the War on Drugs.

The constution was written more then 200 years ago based on the world back then. Maybe it's time to adapt the rules to our world. I don't think the authors of the Constitution even remotely imagined the possibility that one institution could have perfect surveillance of the whole country. But that's where we are going if we don't change the rules.

The constitution has plenty of privacy rights, our government just chooses to circumvent them through sly interpretation, backed up by the courts.

The legal ability of police to spy that we have today is such circumvention.

But to your point, if the government of the last 5 decades is willing to skirt the constitution as written, I'm not sure how much a new one with stronger verbiage will fair.

It seems the Constitution leaves a lot to room for interpretation. Otherwise placing people on the supreme court wouldn't be such a big deal. Tightening up some paragraphs would probably help a lot.