This post may be a little confusing. Do you mean to suggest that Obama has reached beyond executive authority, circumventing the legislature to establish a new SOPA? or is that unintentional?
Because when you say this EO is a watered-down version of a bill, and CISPA was a watered-down version of that, and say that what Obama likes is 'worse' than CISPA - what many people are going to hear is that this EO is the super-mega-SOPA that will take away all their freedoms, and this time sneakily enacted by Obama alone - not that you just think these measures are ill-conceived because they do little to improve security.
I don't know what any of this has to do with SOPA. Or rather: I'm pretty sure none of this has anything to do with SOPA. Even in the early CISPA drafts that mentioned "intellectual property", the animating concern was the theft of source trees and market data, not Creed CDs (intellectual property was stricken from the final version of CISPA passed by the house).
Technology is a big topic. You should just assume that most bills (and EO's) pertaining to technology are not extensions of SOPA, which was a copyright enforcement measure.
To be fair: the President is charged with executing the laws as written. Inasmuch as this EO covers top-down directives for how existing government agencies are to execute on their legislatively-defined missions, he's not going beyond the authority of his office whatsoever.
It's explicitly within his purview to create, or order the creation of, a coherent strategy to meet existing goals, to oversee its implementation, to appoint staff as necessary, to create protocols for inter-governmental operations, etc.
What he can't do, is explicitly order private industries to conform to new protocols or participate in new endeavors, establish penalties for not doing so, etc. -- except inasmuch as private industry is working for the government.
Which is to say: he couldn't order a power plant to overhaul their security to comply with some new government protocol. But he can order the creation of a new government security protocol, even if that requires defense contractors to update accordingly.
the President is charged with executing the laws as written
The President has told us on many occasions: "And where Congress is not willing to act, we're going to go ahead and do it ourselves." That's a direct quote.
The rest of your logic is flawed because you assume that the President is following the rules in the Constitution. Seems to me that he's playing more of a game of "Catch me if you can". Nixon would be jealous.
The President will do what he wants to do, and it's not like the national media will ask many questions about his usurpation of authority.
First, on an admittedly meta note, it's not particularly interesting to explore non-falsifiable arguments on message boards. If your logic holds, Obama can do anything. Why even bother having numbered executive orders? Why not just keep everything absolutely secret and off any record? If Obama is ignoring the Constitution, the only reason for us to presume he's playing small-ball with those violations is to perpetuate the flame war on Hacker News.
Secondly, Obama's "secret" executive order has been reviewed by reporters and compared to previous legislative proposals. The administration is much more constrained in what it can do than was Congress. In particular: the EO pertains to the management of fedgov systems, not private industry, and where the EO touches on private industry, it pertains to the interfaces between fedgov IT and governance and private industries --- ie, how information from the government can be shared with private industry.
If you think this executive order is a Nixonian cat-and-mouse play, I'd respectfully suggest you read more about it before commenting.
I think you are getting into a murky area here. Does the Constitution dictate how the military can deal with cyberattacks, from nations or non-state-actors?
Seems to me that as commander-in-chief, the President has authority to direct the military how to respond to things like this.
Note that in the article, it says that this directive applies to how the military reacts "when combating cyber-attacks directed at major U.S. networks" - assuming that the "US networks" here is referring to government networks.
So if Congress is unwilling to do something on this front, do you expect the military and it's commander-in-chief to do nothing in the meantime?
Public statements like that do not supersede the Constitution; when presidents say things like that, the unspoken context is that their actions are constrained by the rule of law. You need to understand that; otherwise you will drive yourself crazy with all the things that politicians say.
In this particular example, the president can issue orders that control how government agencies operate, so long as they do not contradict a law passed by Congress. He can do this because he is the executive charged with leading government agencies.
What he cannot do--what only Congress can do--is issue an executive order that controls how private companies operate. He does not have direct legal authority over what private companies do; only Congress can set those laws.
The way presidents nuance this is to order that government agencies are only allowed to do business with private companies who do things in certain ways. This way he can influence any companies that want to do business with the federal government (which is a lot of companies). He's not ordering them--he's offering an incentive.
This is similar to how Congress sets the national drinking age. They can't tell states what the drinking age should be, so instead they tell the states that they can only get federal transportation funds if they maintain a drinking age of 21 or older. Since the states all want those funds, they comply.
Because when you say this EO is a watered-down version of a bill, and CISPA was a watered-down version of that, and say that what Obama likes is 'worse' than CISPA - what many people are going to hear is that this EO is the super-mega-SOPA that will take away all their freedoms, and this time sneakily enacted by Obama alone - not that you just think these measures are ill-conceived because they do little to improve security.