Two members of Congress have introduced a bill that would ban the practice of requiring job applicants, employees or students to provide their social networking information.

The Social Networking Online Protection Act, authored by Congressman Eliot Engel of New York and sponsored by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, is in response to a growing number of reports of employers demanding their employees’ Facebook passwords as a condition of employment.

The bill seeks to block any employer from requiring current or potential employees to turn over login credentials to any person; online content can not be used as a condition of employment to "discriminate or deny employment to individuals, nor punish them for refusing to volunteer the information." The bill would apply the same prohibitions to colleges, universities, and K-12 schools. Similar legislation being written by Senators Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) and Chuck Schumer (New York), is expected to be introduced in the Senate later this year.

Facebook has already threatened legal action against organizations who require employees to reveal their Facebook passwords as policy. And the practice is a violation of existing law: the Electronic Communications Protection Act of 1986, which applies to all data stored electronically. But in testimony before Congress earlier this year, the Department of Justice indicated that there would be no prosecution of employers for enforcement of such polices.

Several states have taken up legislation to block the practice as well, following reports of the spread of the practice by the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times. Maryland was the first state to pass legislation banning employers from requiring employees to provide access to their social media; a second bill, which would have banned universities from requiring current and prospective students to provide their social network passwords, failed to pass. Illinois has also voted to protect job applicants from password demands from potential employers.

The Maryland law was driven largely by the controversy over a state agency’s own Facebook intrusions: in January of 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with Maryland’s Department of Public Safety on behalf of Robert Collins, a Maryland Department of Corrections officer who was ordered to turn over his Facebook login information during recertification for his position. Collins recounted the case in this ACLU video from February of 2011: