Tommy - having been involved with government inspection processes before as you know, I look at it more from how things would really work if a business were to be brought up for inspection.
First off - the inspectors are going to schedule a visit for the inspection - if it were a normal inspection, to meet with the holder of records. That assumes that the person being inspected is just a routine look at records.
If the inspectors have a specific reason, which in my opinion is why this whole law came about, to look at someones records where they think that they already have a crime being committed, but just need to be able to prove it, then that would be a very different situation. In my little mind I have to look at why an agency would even draft a law like this, and looking back at my "other life" the times when they invoked a "show up at the door" surprise visit, is when they already had plenty of reason - and were usually right - they just needed to catch the organization in the act.
For us, where we already keep our sites clean, and report illegal stuff, if they really just wanted to inspect to fill their "quotas" which I highly doubt with all the illegal shit going on out there, then they are going to be business like with it. We used to get notified 3 months in advance for inspections, given a list of what they were going to inspect, and the regulatory guides to say "here's how we are going to conduct the inspection. And BTW here's the time we would like to do this and if thats inconvenient, please call us and schedule a different time."
The fear-mongers and "sky-is-falling" people in our industry have done a good job at making this into a gestapo/Orwellian type of situation mostly for their own benefit or because they thrive on the attention.
Tommy - if you remember our phone conversation - there are a lot of what I call "shit-stirrers" in this biz that just want to see everybody cower and hide or even worse - look up to them as "important people" so they keep posting BS that has nothing based in real-life situations. After sitting through numerous government regulator inspections personally, I can tell you that these guys are just civil workers getting paid a pretty low salary, and most (while very knowledgable) are just following a little guide book written by their agency that says step-by-step - here's what to look at and here's the questions to ask
For the minority of situations where DOJ really wants this law available (the guys they know are transporting CP and distributing it) for surprise inspections - I would have to say based on my opinions - they ought to have a tool of some kind to be able to do that - I just dont know what the constitutionally protected way is to accomplish that?