Now Is The Time To Reform Outdated Electronic Privacy Laws

from the vanishing-rights dept

Given everything that's been going on with the stories of NSA surveillance lately, it's more clear than ever that our electronic privacy laws are broken. For many years, we've written about the drastic need for ECPA reform. ECPA is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was passed in 1986. As you can imagine, it's exceptionally outdated and convoluted (such as claiming that any emails on a server for more than 180 days should be considered "abandoned" and available for law enforcement to read -- a concept that makes no sense in an era of hosted email with tremendous storage). ECPA is regularly abused by law enforcement agencies seeking information on Americans. This goes well beyond what the NSA is doing in many ways. There's been support in Congress in the past for ECPA reform, but it's never quite made it.

A large group of organizations and companies -- including us at Floor64/Techdirt, along with (among others) EFF, Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, ACLU, Engine Advocacy, CCIA, American Library Association, reddit, DuckDuckGo and more -- have teamed up to create VanishingRights.com, to push for a much needed update to ECPA's outdated rules. Instead, we'd like to see a return to basic 4th Amendment ideas like requiring a warrant to search for info. Sounds crazy, I know, but we're in an age where we actually have to tell Congress that it's time to respect the Constitution, because they seem to forget about it all too often.

The latest proposal to support ECPA reform, called the Email Privacy Act, or HR 1852, was introduced by Rep. Kevin Yoder and has 137 co-sponsors -- so it has significant support in Congress. But it needs more support if it's actually going to pass in this do-nothing Congress that we have.

Please check out the site, where you can let your elected officials that ECPA needs to be reformed, and that it should respect the basic tenets of the 4th Amendment. You can also read more about ECPA, why it's broken, and what it means for your privacy.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, ecpa, ecpa reform, email, privacy, vanishing rights, warrants