I think it's the same problem as surveillance. When tailing someone required a substantial investment of an actual person's time and a wiretap literally require

I think it's the same problem as surveillance. When tailing someone required a substantial investment of an actual person's time and a wiretap literally required physical handling of the physical lines to that person's phone, it makes/made sense to give the police wide leverage in who they put under a lens because it required a substantial investment of time from the police in a way that was intrinsically limited and unable to scale to the population level. Enter today, when nearly everyone can be and is surveiled with detail cops of previous generation could only dream of, and we're still dealing with those same laws, but we removed the unwritten premises that they're based on: surveillance couldn't scale.