In the short term, there will be no effect upon the average citizen.
Say, if your phone conversations had been recorded for the past ten years and you didn't know. Did that affect you over that ten years?
Remember, "average citizen". That's barring getting arrested based on that evidence or whatever for current crimes.
However, people's problem with such invasions of privacy shouldn't be whether you'd be embarrassed about your research special interestes or the fact that you do whatever else you'd simply rather not people know about. It's not even about being caught in the act of something currently illegal.
The whole intent of the bill of rights to begin with was to help stave of tyranny and to protect people should that sort of thing happen.
Something like this is data that could potentially be used as a "list" A government having a list of people who were Jewish, would make it very easy for someone to target people for incarceration, abuse, or violence, for a well known example.
It's not about how the government may abuse such data tomorrow, but next year, in 5 years, a decade, or several decades. What could be done with such data? Say, our government is more or less "good" for a few decades but then some really bad people get into power, your grandkids go off the grid so as to not reveal that they're Jewish(just to use the same example). However, birth records tie them to you, and ALL of your interests are cataloged and archived.
This is the part of what the US founding fathers had considered when it comes to human rights, so they set up structures to help avoid having something like this put into place. Should you encounter an agent on the street, he would have no way of knowing who/what you are aside from what he could see with his own eyes.
Forget the jewish issue. What if radicals came into power that had some sort of hatred against gays, certain political or or other spiritual beliefs or other lifestyle choices. Say, if fast food became a legal requirement, but you're caught looking up recipes. What if working on your own car or computer became illegal? These last two examples are a bit more likely than people think within the next few years.
It is a historical fact that laws change over time, and that, indeed, governments don't necessarily need laws to have some form of persecution. Knowing this is the case we should at least have some laws about how they obtain information on individuals so that we have something to which we can hold them accountable...
That's poor phrasing, but the idea and TL;DR is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_[1] ...
Essentially, there are warning signs. The more measures we have in place to prevent X from happening, the sooner it can be caught and rectified. To stave off the loss of those rights, we need to try and fight constant erosion of those rights before we hit a point where it is too late to do anything about it at all.
That is why people are so upset over this being put into law now. A major battle was lost.
[[Edit: will be out for the day. I normally wouldn't status update, but I'm getting a lot of discussion and leaving the house was entirely spur of the moment. Thanks everyone for the replies and discussion, which I love, but real life calls.]]
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x66aa/eli5_how_will_the_new_cisa_bill_affect_the/cy2323o
