Is your Congress-critter supporting Leahy’s privacy bill?
Now who would want to see my email?
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) has proposed sweeping digital privacy protections that would require the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.
Leahy’s proposal (.pdf) would nullify a provision of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allows the government to acquire a suspect’s e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed, as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. The government had only needed to show that it has “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful in an investigation…
“We think this is the beginning of the discussion. This is a very positive step,” Chris Calabrese, legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said by telephone…
But the Leahy bill, which has not been sent to committee for review, is a give-and-take of sorts when it comes to other forms of electronic privacy…
The measure would also expand, or at least clarify, the information the government may obtain with so-called National Security Letters. They allow the FBI, without a court order, to obtain telecommunication, financial and credit records relevant to a government investigation. The Leahy bill adds “electronic communication identifiable information” and strikes “electronic communication transactional records.”
“It is not appropriate for the government to be able to get detailed information on everybody who you communicated with,” Kevin Bankston, a privacy lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said by telephone.
That said, the bill is “a great leap forward,” Bankston said.
The struggle takes us all the way back to the founding of this nation. There have always been those who are committed to the power of the government over the rights of individuals. And some libertarians who refused to consider the question of benefits to the common good superseding any individual’s rights.
Most educated folks come down on the side which support individual freedoms within history’s context. Those who are tied emotionally for one reason or another to the extremes of history and government end up stuck into the disparate worlds of anarchist or fascist. Although they occasionally share rationales. :}
I wish Senator Leahy well with his attempt and will zap off an email via www.congress.org to my elected representatives suggesting they support the bill, too.
