What's unprecedented to an even greater degree is the scale at which mundane communications are now recorded. In the past, the bulk of private communications we

What's unprecedented to an even greater degree is the scale at which mundane communications are now recorded. In the past, the bulk of private communications were opaque to the government, even with a warrant, because people exchanged private information mostly verbally, face to face. Today many analogous conversations take place online, in instant messages, in email, and in other persistent media. Even when the content of a communication isn't recorded as an artifact of its medium of expression and transmission, there's almost always a record left behind to indicate that the communication took place, revealing associations and hinting at what was said. So by emphasizing the legal history of searches of "long-distance communications", you've moved the goalposts by a mile. Changes in the way we communicate with one another, reflecting changes in communications technology (and changes in society), mean that governmental powers in searches and surveillance, powers which formerly applied only to relatively rare forms of communication, now apply very broadly. At the same time the government's cost of performing such searches and surveillance has plummeted, multiplying the power of police and spies to monitor our words and use them against us. It's an unprecedented state of affairs, indeed.