Police sweeps with dogs sniffing outside of parked cars? In fact, this is exactly what happens at the Niagara Falls Canadian border (mostly trying to get back into the US). I doubt you'll find many that complain about this practice.

The difference between dogs and other counter-examples you cite is that the police dogs are trained to respond to certain stimuli that demonstrates illegal behavior. The police dogs in this case could only detect illicit substances. They could not detect the presence of lingerie, or subversive political documents, etc. You are correct- if packet sniffers could be developed that could only detect the presence of illegal substances in electronic messages (for instance, plans to commit a criminal act such as assassination, which are not protected speech), then it would be permissable under the same argument, and I doubt many people would be offended by it in theory.

In practice, however, I suspect that packet-sniffing technology is not robust enough to decipher messages to the point of being able to only flag illegal ones. Thus, simple pattern matching would be necessary, and since this demonstrably would result in many false positives, I don't think the same logic applies as in the case of the drug-sniffing dogs.

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