UPDATED 22:19 EDT / FEBRUARY 07 2017

NEWS

Email Privacy Act may finally pass, making government snooping harder

Amid fears that newly elected President Donald Trump would make good on his promise to expand the government’s surveillance powers, consumers worried about their privacy were just given a glimmer of hope today.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday passed an email privacy bill, the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 387), that requires law enforcement to have a warrant before it can access the emails of citizens of the U.S. The bipartisan bill (apparently there is still such a thing) introduced by Colorado Rep. Jared Polis and Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder, was passed in the House of Representatives last year, but didn’t get past the Senate.

One of the main reasons for this was an amendment introduced by then-Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, and another Republican senator. Sessions wanted to give law enforcement the ability to snoop on emails, but only in what were called “emergency cases.” This essentially ended hopes of it being a bona fide privacy bill. It’s thought this time it may get through the Senate, with Sessions likely out of the way.

Currently the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a law passed 30 years ago, allows law enforcement to search emails without a warrant as long as emails are 180 days old and still live on servers. The logic is that emails that old are no longer private because they have been abandoned, which may have been slightly more rational 30 years ago when we didn’t have years of email correspondence saved.

Neema Singh-Giuliani, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in Wired, “We shouldn’t be reliant on a particular administration policy to ensure that Americans’ fourth amendment rights are protected. The public wants to know that their information is protected whether the president is Donald Trump or anyone else.”

The sentiment on the bill’s chances in the Senate this time is mostly optimistic. Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, said Google has fought for years to have the ECPA reformed. Now is a historic opportunity to do the right thing by the American public, he added: “The Email Privacy Act ensures that the content of our emails are protected in the same way that the Fourth Amendment protects the items we store in our homes.”

Singh-Giuliani said in a press release that he urged the Senate not to make the same mistake again, saying that now it was time “to act quickly to pass legislation that ensures that Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights are protected in the digital age.”

Photo: Pixabay

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