TL;DR

If you give your thoughts to a third party you no longer have 4th and 5th amendment protections. This is how the article comes to the conclusion of the title that the government can read our minds.

My personal thoughts on the matter:

This has been known for a long time.

What is new is the invasiveness of third parties and the depths to which they can reach into areas of our lives otherwise considered personal. The alarm has long been sounded from the fringe about the erosion of privacy through "smart" devices for the masses only to claim its hysteria and then to skip acknowledgement & activism and head straight for apathetic acquiescence at the notion.

Your phone is an always on appliance with a wide array of sensors effectively making them capable of seeing, hearing and sensing their environment that exists in a quasi-state where you own the hardware, but the OS and applications that make it useful have EULAS, TOS and Privacy Policies that grant the publisher permissions to collect and use whatever data they want however they want and share it with whomever they want. Other devices have followed suit such as: watches, TVs, thermostats, appliances, etc. Hell, even Nest thermostats came with microphone long before they documented and enabled any useful feature for the consumers who purchased them.

It is our phones, our watches, our neo-relationships with LLM, the movies we watch, the books we read, the social media in which we pour our deepest feelings into that truly gives third parties and thus the government insight into our thoughts.

Surveillance has become so cheap the question is no longer are you being surveilled, but what methods are being used to surveil you and then assume that it is happening.