Computers are the equivalent of diaries of old, but with incredibly more detail and access to information that will often record the most intimate minutia of your everyday life, from photos, to financial details, to documents, to emails, to websites visited, and so forth. The common person might thing that with a basic password for user access or perhaps password protected folders or documents that he has done a fairly decent job of protecting his privacy. Furthermore, most people believe that their computer is their computer, and not subject to searches or seizure, but when the government has their eyes on you, for whatever reason, fair or foul, your rights quickly begin to shrivel in comparison to the might of the full governmental arsenal against you.
Although some computers are movable devices, such as laptops, a desktop computer that sits inside of your home at your desk is quite common, to which it may contain all of your digital information from the last five years, or even before, if you bothered to transfer digital files from one computer to the next, previously. For whatever reason, one day, the police come knocking at your place at residence, and wish to search your premises, to which you as the only person at home answer their request with a polite denial, whereupon in absence of exigent circumstances that necessitate their immediate entry, they will then be forced to come up with a search warrant. The police promised to come back shortly with a search warrant, and sad to say they return with one, which within its terms grants them permission to seize your computer, because that computer may have incriminating evidence of a certain crime. If that is what the search warrant permits, your protests now will avail you of nothing, and even if that computer, contains information of extreme importance to yourself, private, personal, or whatever, the control of it is now in the government agent's hands.
Once the government takes control of your computer they may or may not request from you, password information, of which it is your 5th Amendment right, of non self-incrimination to deny them such information, and perhaps by not giving up your encryption information you might keep the dogs at bay for a while, but almost for a certainty, the government will eventually break through. You would think, though, that after the government takes complete and thorough control of your computer that they would then be limited to searching just for incriminating information that was subject to the initial search warrant terms to begin with, and specifically not be allowed to systematically search any and everything on your computer, but that thought would be incorrect, as the government can pretty much search everything on your computer without limitations or accountability, because there doesn't appear to be any legalor supervisory safeguards thatwould protect your Constitutional rights.
In point of fact, in this computer age, the right of the people to be: "… secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects…" is being torn to shreds by the fact that current court law appears to allow the government with a properly executed search warrant unlimited andcomplete intrusive access to everything ever recorded on our personal computers, meaning, in effect, that in America, there are two classes of people, those that are subject to arbitrary and capricious law, and those that are above that law.