Would you find it unreasonable to have a search warrant on every single American's internet activity? As far as I understand it, that is, in effect, what CISPA proposes.
CISPA's true motivation is becoming very clear. It's needed to expand a pilot program for dragnet surveillance by the NSA and defense contractors. You know, the same thing they've been doing for ages and getting sued over by the EFF. If you read the letters in support of CISPA by the defense contractors who are lobbying for it and funding Mike Rogers who authored it, they even acknowledge this program by name (it's called the DIB cyber pilot).
That's why the bill is so vague, and why they refuse amendments to narrow the scope. It's a get out of jail free card for complicit companies and they can claim virtually anything is related to "security". They can also be wrong, as long as they claim it was "in good faith". It's more or less the "state secrets privilege" equivalent, but for companies cooperating with the "data sharing".
It solves nothing, because it's already legal to share threat data. You just have to scrub it of private or protected information. If its protected, it's because we passed a law for something we felt was worth protecting. For CISPA to just undo all of those laws wholesale is outrageous.
It's needed to expand a pilot program for dragnet surveillance by the NSA and defense contractors.
What horseshit! Even your own link describes the program as applicable to private networks of the participating companies. That's why there's a quote from an email wondering (emphasis mine) "Will the program cover all parts of the company network -- including say day care centers (as mentioned as a question in a [deputies committee meeting]) and what are the policy implications of this?"
There are a lot of advocacy organizations (EPIC, etc) that like to bluster about what it does. Right now EPIC is blustering that it's part of authorizing a secret program.
What they didn't tell you is that this is their real goal is to gain possible congressional support for the FOIA request they filed, they are just trying to tie it all together so they can gain support from CISPA haters.
A lot of these advocacy orgs that lobby are good in the sense of trying to do what they think is right but they often present pretty extreme (IMHO) interpretations of bills/laws and viewpoints to support this.
Full disclosure: I have interned at one of these advocacy orgs before (CDT).
It's true the government would be happy if they could monitor everyone's activity, but that isn't CISPA, and crying wolf repeatedly about every bill just makes people less likely to care. If they really wanted to monitor everyone's activity, they'd just do it, and clean up the mess later.
Like passing retroactive bills so its "not illegal".
(not saying this one is just that but they have done it in the past so the telcos didn't get sued I believe)
Sure, but note that this is completely constitutional, the constitution explicitly grants Congress the right to set the jurisdiction of all courts inferior to the Supreme Court.
And is not part of the problem here trying to determine the "cyber equivalent" of such things as plain sight and hot pursuit? A lot of what goes on online is the equivalent of high noon in the public square, even if people don't quite understand that.
No. The judge signature is basically the other part of the 4th amendment, about warrants. That is what makes an otherwise unreasonable search, reasonable: it was reviewed by a neutral magistrate, and the neutral magistrate determined they had probable cause.
If the search is reasonable, you don't need anything from a judge.
This doesn't mean you can go busting into places, but ...
What? No, no, no, NO. That is completely wrong. There are cases where a warrant is not necessary, such as immediate danger to an officer. However, a warrant is issued only upon probable cause. This still needs to be reasonable, and the judge is the one who decides if the search is reasonable.
What?
You are confusing the warrant requirement, which is completely separate from the reasonableness of a search.
I'm not sure how you are coming up with what you think is th analysis, but every law school textbook, supreme court opinion, etc, will tell you that you start with whether the search was reasonable.
If the search was reasonable by law , there is no 4th amendment violation. Period.
Maybe you are confused because they often say these are not searches? For example, you will read that doing helicopter flyovers, even when looking in people's fields, is reasonable (which at the time, meant it wasn't a violation of the subject's reasonable expectation of privacy), and thus, not considered a search that is subject to the rest of the 4th amendment. This isn't because it's "not a search" in reality, it's because the 4th only protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, not all searches and seizures, and thus, for the rest of 4th amendment purposes, it's not a search.
If the search was not reasonable, it either has to fall into an exception, or requires a warrant.
Now, current jurisprudence considers most searches without a warrant unreasonable (subject to plain sight, automobile exceptions, etc), but that is irrelevant to the steps in the analysis.
You seem to be mixing a lot of the analysis and requirements around.
