Los Angeles Times | November 29 2012 | Thanks, Minty
The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved legislationrequiring that police obtain a search warrant to gain access to private emails and other forms of electronic communication.
The bill, championed by committee Chairman Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), updates legislation developed before the widespread adoption of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol that forms the backbone of modern email networks, let alone Facebook or Twitter.
Privacy advocates, such as the ACLU, applauded the vote.
“This is an important gain for privacy,” ACLU legislative counsel Chris Calabrese said in a statement. “We believe law enforcement should use the same standard to search your inbox that they do to search your home.”
And Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Lee Tien described the vote as “a strong message to the Department of Justice that our digital 4th Amendment rights don’t expire after six months.”
But Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the committee, was critical of the bill, calling for a more open debate and input from more interested parties from both sides.
“Given that the House isn’t going to take this bill up, we should work to ensure we strike the proper balance between privacy and safety, just as we did in 1986 when we first passed ECPA,” the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, he said.
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James Corbett – Half a century ago people had to be reassured their social security card was not being used for identification. Now there are federally standardized and globally synchronized ID cards, government-sponsored online ID projects, DNA databases, and even secret databases of your newborn baby’s genetic information and nobody bats an eyelid. How did we get here, and how can we break this conditioning?