> compiled a database of my political donations without probable cause.

I share your sentiment, I wouldn't appreciate that either of course.

I find it hard to feel optimistic about privacy in America, and in a similar way, probable cause. Three short vignettes:

1) Living in Brooklyn a couple years back I was surprised one day to see a white van with ALPR cameras slowly cruising residential streets, followed by a squad car. There was clearly some arrangement where this private company was teaming up with NYPD to boot offenders' vehicles. Ostensibly the private company had access to some NYPD database [0]. The slippery slope there makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. If a referendum happened on that one, I missed it.

2) Fast forward to Jan 2017 - shortly before Obama left office, the NSA was given significantly increased authority to share the dragnet surveillance it hoovers up [1] [2].

3) In May 2018, as you may have heard, major US carriers were caught selling real-time customer location data to private companies [3] who resold it.

Meanwhile what you might hope would be prosecutors' fear of, well, prosecution for attempting to subvert the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine for e.g. parallel construction [4] seems quite undermined by prosecutorial immunity [5].

I don't claim to be a legal expert but I do find it truly scary to think about.

What else is going on we don't know?

[0] https://paylock.com/who-we-serve/

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveill...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/locationsmart-securus-location-d...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity