What makes you think governments are going to respect a Bill of Rights for the virtual world when they don't even respect the one for the physical world!
Since Berners-Lee's suggestion isn't backed by any political body at all (powerful or not), it seems like a completely useless suggestion.
Even if it were backed by a powerful political body, like, say... the US or the EU, I'm not sure how comforted I would be.
Edit: It's been a while since I've taken Latin, but "Magna Carta" essentially means "Big/Great Paper," so the tongue-in-cheek modern equivalent might be something like "Yotta Byte."
First, saying "things are worse in [some] other places that do not have a Bill of Rights" does not negate OP's point that "Far as I can tell, the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about [in the US]".
> I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.
You may enjoy those freedoms. But not all US citizens enjoy these freedoms.
On paper the Bill of Rights protects all US citizens, and all US citizens equally. In practice, that is very much not the case. As the saying goes, freedom of speech exists to protect those whose words critics want to silence, not those whose uncontroversial words have no critics. More broadly, the litmus test for the Bill of Rights is not whether your freedoms are being upheld, but whether all others' freedoms are being upheld.
It's not enough to simply say that "the implementation is imperfect" when the exact ways in which the implementation is failing are the exact ways in which it needs to succeed.
They are restrictions upon the US government. In practice, this usually protects US nationals to a greater extent than any other nationality, but in theory, it should protect everyone on the planet from just one (particularly powerful) government. People elsewhere have their own government nastiness to deal with; they don't need to worry about ours as well.
So the Bill of Rights works for you. Good job! Your environment is configured correctly.
But it has to work for everybody. You really need to look in to what is happening to the people in your municipality, county, state, and country that have less money and political power than you have.
What I see is that poorer people are being imprisoned at an ever-increasing rate, and that richer people are getting away with murder, sometimes literally. What I am seeing is less "rule by law" than "rule by money". It isn't quite "rule by men", but it certainly isn't equal justice for all.
Even so, we have our own Bill of Rights across on this side of the pond:
There's some conflict on that, but there's precedent that the fourth applies to all citizens and whomever happens to be on US Soil, whether they're a citizen or not.
Politicians, realizing that only the citizens may vote, may exempt those folks from their otherwise unconstitutional activities, because others have no effective means to seek redress. My reading of the 4th is that it is a restriction on the conduct of the government, such that it applies to every natural person on Earth.
It may well be that the Supreme Court has not ruled this way because it is overwhelmingly staffed by politically-connected lawyers, rather than linguists and logicians.
The government is not allowed to search anyone, anywhere, without a specific purpose. Drawing a dividing line between foreign and domestic spying is a distraction from the notion that Uncle Sam is breaking the law when he listens in to Joe Terrorist's phone calls from halfway across the world to about 45% of the way around via dragnets and data mining.
We are willing to tolerate some degree of law-breaking when it is clearly in our own interest to do so, but it has gone well beyond that by now. Someone's wrist out there is just aching for a good, light slap.
Clearly though, not all rights in the bill of rights can be held to the same standard... for instance, voting rights should not as clearly be extended to non-citizens who just happen to be on American soil, but one's right to life had very well ought to be.