Digital 4th, Yoder, Polis Encourage House To Pass Email Privacy Act
With 281 co-sponsors, the Email Privacy Act (HR-699) is the “most supported bill” in the House that hasn't been passed, Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., testified Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee during its Criminal Justice Reform Listening Session. Digital 4th, a bipartisan coalition dedicated to reforming and modernizing Fourth Amendment privacy rights, wrote a letter to House leadership Thursday urging passage of the legislation. The law would “strengthen privacy protections online by updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA),” the letter said.
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ECPA was forward-looking when it was enacted in 1986, but due to advancements in technology, it has been dramatically outpaced, the letter said. Inconsistent court rulings create uncertainty for service providers, law enforcement agencies and the hundreds of millions of Americans who use the Internet in their personal and professional lives, it said. “When ECPA was written, the internet as we understand it did not exist,” Yoder said. “Only 340,000 Americans even subscribed to cell phone service” and Mark Zuckerberg was only 2 years old in 1986, Yoder said in a news release Thursday. Society and technology have evolved, now digital privacy laws must evolve, he said.
“For too long now Americans’ electronic communications have been subject to invasive and unwarranted searches based on laws written for the Apple 2, not the iPhone 6,” Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., a co-sponsor of the bill, said in the release. “Today, 281 of my colleagues -- an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives -- are standing up to say that the government has no more business reading your personal email than it does reading your physical mail,” he said.
The Email Privacy Act would update the ECPA by making it clear that government must obtain a warrant in order to require a service provider to disclose the content of emails, tests or other private material stored by the service provider on behalf of its users, the Digital 4th letter said. Exceptions would be made in emergencies or under other existing exceptions, it said.
Center for Democracy & Technology Vice President-Policy Chris Calabrese, a Digital 4th member, said in the release: “Americans deserve warrant protections for their emails and Congress has clearly heard this message from their constituents loud and clear. The Email Privacy Act represents a vital step forward in ensuring our privacy is respected online.” He called for a full House vote on the Email Privacy Act “now.”
It was impossible for Congress to foresee the type of technological advancements that would occur nearly three decades after the passage of ECPA, said Americans for Tax Reform Federal Affairs Manager Katie McAuliffe, a Digital 4th member, in the release. “As a result, our emails, photos, documents and other items stored in the cloud are in jeopardy of government intrusion,” she said. “Privacy rights should not stop online.”