In order to be a free people, the people need to have full control of their digital life, so that the government, along with its policing arm are thereby not permitted to rummage through our cell phones, our computers, and our cloud storage in the search for whatever interests them so as to basically know everything about us, and thus make us vulnerable to all sorts of bad events, over and above the fact that such an unlimited search could result in our arrest and subsequent incarceration.
The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution makes it abundantly clear that we are to be secure in our persons, which includes what would be for most people, our digital life, from unreasonable searches, and that a warrant needs to be issued under probable cause describing the particular place or items to be searched and the specific things that are being searched for and no further searching is permitted beyond that.
The reason why those that are harassed and arrested, who thereby lose access to their cellphone or their computer, need to be protected from an unreasonable search and seizure of their cellphone or computer is the fact that we find that a cellphone has so much actionable information about the owner of such, that it is relatively easy for those that have control of that phone to build not only a very detailed itinerary of who and what that person is, but also to have pretty much all of the most important contacts from that cellphone available for the policing arm of the state to consider investigating, as well. The bottom line is that our cellphones are sophisticated diaries of our lives that are highly accurate and, for most people, intended to be private and available only to that individual or possibly a few others trusted with such information. So too, our computers have a record of things that we have written as well as read, our financial information, and our emails, which in short contains a significant amount of information about how we conduct our lives, so that, these items in the hands of the police, basically exposes everything that we are, and should not be something that is permitted to happen without robust guardrails protecting our inherent privacy and basic right to be left alone from the prying eyes of the government or other unauthorized entities.
Basically, the only way that the people can be assured that their digital lives are not being violated when their phone or their computer are in the possession of the policing arm of the state is only when there are representatives of the people who are given the responsibility to supervise and monitor the searching of a given phone or computer, subject to strong penalties against those that violate the Constitutional restraints of such, should they go beyond the limits as restricted by the Fourth Amendment, as well as other protections provided to the people. Indeed, from an individual liberty perspective, it could be said that nothing is more important to our freedom than the protection as well as the confidentiality of our digital lives, and should this be routinely violated, then the people are not free.