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Eric Holder endorses warrants for e-mail. It’s about time.
Eric Holder endorses warrants for e-mail. It’s about time.
By Timothy B. Lee
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder declared his support for requiring the government to get a warrant before reading Americans’ e-mail. It’s about time.
The law has long protected Americans against warrantless wiretapping of their phone calls. But the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — ”ECPA” to nerds — enacted in 1986 provides much weaker protection for e-mail. People have been calling for ECPA reform for years. Holder’s comments are a sign that Congress might actually do it.
When ECPA was written, storage was expensive and online services charged high per-minute fees. So users would log into their online services, download their e-mails, and log off. Congress assumed things would always work this way, so they didn’t provide strong privacy protections for e-mail that was left on the server indefinitely.
<...>
Even the Justice Department, which long defended the permissive status quo, now admits that it doesn’t make sense.
“Some of the lines drawn by the SCA that may have made sense in the past have failed to keep up with the development of technology,” a Justice Department official told the House Judiciary Committee in March. “There is no principled basis to treat e-mail less than 180 days old differently than e-mail more than 180 days old,” she said. “Similarly, it makes sense that the statute not accord lesser protection to opened e-mails than it gives to e-mails that are unopened.”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/eric-holder-endorses-warrants-for-e-mail-its-about-time/
By Timothy B. Lee
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder declared his support for requiring the government to get a warrant before reading Americans’ e-mail. It’s about time.
The law has long protected Americans against warrantless wiretapping of their phone calls. But the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — ”ECPA” to nerds — enacted in 1986 provides much weaker protection for e-mail. People have been calling for ECPA reform for years. Holder’s comments are a sign that Congress might actually do it.
When ECPA was written, storage was expensive and online services charged high per-minute fees. So users would log into their online services, download their e-mails, and log off. Congress assumed things would always work this way, so they didn’t provide strong privacy protections for e-mail that was left on the server indefinitely.
<...>
Even the Justice Department, which long defended the permissive status quo, now admits that it doesn’t make sense.
“Some of the lines drawn by the SCA that may have made sense in the past have failed to keep up with the development of technology,” a Justice Department official told the House Judiciary Committee in March. “There is no principled basis to treat e-mail less than 180 days old differently than e-mail more than 180 days old,” she said. “Similarly, it makes sense that the statute not accord lesser protection to opened e-mails than it gives to e-mails that are unopened.”
- more -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/eric-holder-endorses-warrants-for-e-mail-its-about-time/
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[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
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