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The 4th Amendment is at issue here. This is just a neat end-run around the 4th Amendment; it doesn't apply if you can put enough soft pressure on businesses to have them report on their own users.

You're right that it's legal under the current interpretation of the laws. It just means the 4th Amendment isn't worth the paper it was printed on, and it'll get relegated to the "stuff people used to care about category" like the 3rd.

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kinda like saying it should be illegal for a cop to _ask_ for your ID

That's a very different situation. For one, that's a first party request; I can refuse (in some states, in some circumstances). A license also can't contain private information; it's a physical manifestation of information that a person willingly surrendered to the government.

There's a huge difference between a cop asking a single person for their ID, and dragnet surveillance of people with a particular viewpoint.

I think his point is there's a similar distinction between monitoring a group of people who attacked democracy, and dragnet surveillance of the entire population.

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