At actual border crossings, the practice at the time of the framers was that warrantless searches/inspections at border crossings were normal and permissible.
At actual border crossings, the practice at the time of the framers was not to carry along all of your private correspondence, business records, reading lists, and so forth. Related to that, given the complaints that started the war, I'd strongly expect that in Washington's day it was not permitted to perform unwarranted searches of one's sealed correspondence going through the US Post. [0]
As the ability to perform surveillance on members of the public expands, laws and regulations must be reconsidered with these new capabilities in mind if just outcomes are to be maintained. Laws, regulations, and punishments that were just and reasonable when one expected to learn about and prosecute one offender in -say- a million are likely unjust and unreasonable when one expects to learn about and prosecute every single offender. [2]
[0] See also Section 16 on numbered page 236 of [1]
I'm not saying that iPhones and computers don't challenge the premises of the border search exception, only that those searches don't by themselves represent some decay of the Fourth Amendment.
We need a constitutional amendment that says "we really mean it" with respect to the 4th and 9th amendments, explicitly including personal digital data and criminalizing general surveillance. With fangs.
You replied:
The border search exception was designed by the framers.
and I wrote the clarification that I did because -given the context- it seemed pretty clear to me that you'd missed OP's point.
I'd go further and argue that law enforcement and other government agents should be absolutely prohibited from accessing ordinary people's data [0] stored with or collected/computed by a third party without first getting a warrant or other such authorization from The Court. It has been ages since most of that sort of data could reasonably be considered «incidental business records», and how the law treats it absolutely needs to be updated to match the reality of how regular people's day-to-day interactions with third parties have changed.
I've been getting the impression that all that metaphorical rocket fuel you and your colleagues have been metaphorically sipping is burning you out. Don't be hesitant to take a sabbatical or extended vacation to perform a solid personal health check.
As I'm sure you know, chronic exhaustion and overwork is insidious and impairs your ability to recognize that you're affected by it. Even those of us who very definitely know better than to get caught by it sometimes get caught by it... and getting sufficiently out from under it to even recognize that you've been substantially impaired by it (let alone fully recover from it) takes more time than one might expect.
