Senate Judiciary Committee Votes That Accessing Your Email Should Require A Warrant
from the good-for-them dept
Well, that went more smoothly than expected. Today, in a markup for reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in the Senate, the Senate Judiciary Committee very quickly (like 10 minutes after it started) approved an amendment offered by Senators Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee, which would amend the law to make it so that law enforcement needs to get a warrant if it's accessing your email. As we've discussed in the past, the ECPA today is completely outdated, and treats different emails differently -- but a key point is that emails over 180 days old don't require a warrant, just a subpoena, because the law mistakenly judges them to be abandoned. The Amendment was approved by a voice vote, meaning that there was pretty strong support for it. The Leahy-Lee plan is definitely a necessary step in protecting privacy of emails, and while Leahy especially has been pushing it for a while, seeing strong support in the Senate is a good sign for (hopefully) having it become law.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: ecpa, mike lee, patrick leahy
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Unless the government asks really really nicely, and then it can just be handed over to them. With this and CISPA you get the feeling people in congress have multiple personality disorder.
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While the white house needs to cover up a potential scandal, the republicans want to strenghten the security apparatus in USA. By giving unlimited rights to government three letter salad, the only stone in their shoe is efficiency and that is definitely less controversial than limiting the peoples rights.
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Amazing
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Re: Amazing
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Then your email is still theirs.
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Call me an optimist.
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Regular email is more like a postcard. A postcard is mailed and anyone and everyone who sees the post card can easily read not only addressing information but the entire contents of the card. This is the same way regular email is sent across the internet. It can be read by anyone who's system it passes through. (Probably 3 - 10 SMTP servers and countless switches and routers).
If you want to send a letter like email, one that can't be read by everyone along the way) then you need to encrypt the email. Unfortunately, despite things like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) being around for well over a decade, as well as other encryption options. People, for the most part, have refused to embrace the option to securely transmit emails. They just can't be bothered, even when sending personal information such as SS#s Name age address...
Sure you can make it so they need to get a warrant to scan your inbox, but why do that when they can easily get your email while in transit with something like the FBI's former Carnivore system or now with NarusInsight (or whatever other unpublished methods they have currently).
Much like all security most people just can't be bothered, or they think they don't have anything important enough to protect. They are wrong of course, but that doesn't change the facts. This is even more true with social media, which is something I have yet to embrace.
Much of my email is encrypted, because frankly it is my responsibility to protect that which I care about. However, some of it can't be encrypted because the other party(ies) refused to be bothered with such things.
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Privacy is but an Illusion
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Email Encryption is the answer
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