The ECPA Modernization Act: reforming data privacy laws for the modern web – The Verge

Texas first state to mandate warrants for email surveillance

2013-06-17T18:24:44-04:00

SHUTTERSTOCK Texas flag

Texas Governor Rick Perry has signed a bill into law that mandates law enforcement get a warrant to access emails. The bill (HB 2268), addresses the outdated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which allows law enforcement to obtain emails without a warrant if they are marked as "read" or if they are over 180 days old. In those situations, authorities only require a subpoena to gain access because they are considered abandoned. The bill signed into law today only covers Texans at the state and local levels from this dated understanding of digital communications, but it is said to be the first such law on the books in the US. W …

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FBI maintains it can access emails without a warrant, internal document reveals

2013-05-08T15:25:02-04:00

FBI2

The FBI still holds that it can access private emails without a warrant, according to a 2012 internal document released today by the American Civil Liberties Union. The practice has been in question since a 2010 federal court ruling found that Fourth Amendment rights extend to emails stored in the cloud. But while the ruling offers legal guidance on how to obtain digital communications during an investigation, it only applies to four states because of the court's jurisdiction.

The FBI says whatever it's doing is within the law

Rather than following the ruling's guidance, the FBI is still including an Electronic Communications Privacy Act (EC …

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Senate committee passes ECPA bill to increase email privacy, full floor vote next

2013-04-25T11:00:31-04:00

Senator Patrick Leahy

A bipartisan Senate committee just voted unanimously to advance a privacy reform bill that would tighten the restrictions on how the government and law enforcement can access user email and other electronic messages in investigations. Called the ECPA Amendments Act, the bill would modify the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require government and law enforcement agencies to get a warrant for all types of electronic communications regardless of whether or not they had been read by the user, and no matter how old they are.

Requires a warrant for all electronic communications, regardless of age or read status

Previously, the …

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Internal Revenue Service denies searching email without a warrant

2013-04-16T14:20:07-04:00

Washington Monument

Internal IRS employee manuals and memos released by the American Civil Liberties Union last week suggested that the Internal Revenue Service may be reading private email without a warrant, but the tax agency today denied the claims in a Congressional hearing. As The Hill reports, IRS Commissioner Steven Miller told senators that the agency "is not taking that position," and that the IRS obtains a search warrant before requesting emails from an ISP in criminal investigations.

The ACLU's Freedom of Information Act request to the IRS uncovered a 2009 handbook in which the IRS stated that the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails - a symptom …

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Justice Department changes stance, now supports search warrants to access user email

2013-03-19T14:30:14-04:00

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The US Justice Department says it's now willing to consider getting search warrants to access almost all types of user emails, a stark change from its previous arguments that it could use a less-strict subpoena for reading emails that users had already opened or that were older than 180 days. "We agree […] that there is no principled basis to treat email less than 180 days old differently than email more than 180 days old," said Justice Department attorney Elana Tyrangiel in her testimony before House lawmakers today, later adding that her agency would also support changing federal laws to treat opened and unopened emails the same way, too.

…

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Google testifies to Congress calling for more email privacy, says current law ‘fails’

2013-03-19T10:02:31-04:00

US Capitol 5 (Verge Stock)

Google's legal director Richard Salgado is due to testify before a committee at the House of Representatives this morning on reforming email privacy law to help both users and Google. In prepared remarks published on Google's Public Policy Blog today, Salgado says the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was good when it was enacted, but that times have changed and so much user content is now cloud-based that the law has created "inconsistent, confusing, and uncertain standards" and that "the law fails to preserve the reasonable privacy expectations of Americans today."

"The law fails to preserve the reasonable privacy expectati …

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Privacy bill would ban police from getting email and location data without a warrant

2013-03-06T19:56:53-05:00

Google Congress

Privacy advocates in Congress have introduced another bi-partisan bill attempting to amend decades-old legislation that has allowed police and government to search private data without a warrant. The bill, called the Online Communications and Geolocation Privacy Act, looks to fix the severely outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 so that email and location data stored by third parties like Google or AT&T receive the same warrant protections as data stored on a personal computer.

"Fourth Amendment protections don't stop at the Internet. Americans expect Constitutional protections to extend to their online communications and …

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Google begins offering vague estimates on secret FBI surveillance

2013-03-05T18:22:51-05:00

google transparency report 1020

Google's bi-annual Transparency Reports have sought to provide users with detailed information on how frequently governments request and gain access to their private data through search warrants and court subpoenas. But there's one highly secretive, often misused, and increasingly common method that members of law enforcement use to get data which has never been included in the reports: the National Security Letter, or NSL.

The FBI claims that "releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations."

In an update on Google's blog today, the company revealed it will begin "shedding more light" on the frequency of these secret s …

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Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook say they require warrants to give over private content

2013-01-26T06:57:07-05:00

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook all say that they require full warrants in order to provide the contents of emails and messages to government entities, The Hill reports. That's a higher standard than currently required by US law, which as of now is largely defined by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The ECPA was passed in 1986 and sets a relatively low bar for accessing private data - but Senator Patrick Leahy has been trying to pass a revision that would require warrants, though the bill stalled out in the last Congress.

While the update for the ECPA is pending, those four companies all gave The Hill variations on t …

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Senate Judiciary Committee approves bill requiring authorities to obtain warrants for email records

2012-11-29T13:14:30-05:00

Senator Patrick Leahy

The US Senate Judiciary Committee today approved a bill that would require authorities to produce warrants illustrating probable cause before retrieving email records and other data stored on the web. Though the committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the measure, which would amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the changes face a rocky road to becoming law as they'll need to gain passage among the full Senate and House of Representatives. Sponsoring the bill is Senator Patrick Leahy, who just last week was the fixture of a controversy that alleged lawmakers were planning to loosen such privacy restrictions for federal agencie …

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