Can Some Internet Memes Finally Get Congress To Pass New Legislation To Protect Your Privacy Online?

from the the-last-time-we-reformed-our-privacy-laws... dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

For many, many years, we've been talking about the need for ECPA reform . ECPA -- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- is an incredibly outdated piece of legislation from the 1980s that governs law enforcement's ability to access email and other electronic communications. This was the era before the internet was anywhere close to the mainstream (though it did exist). Among the various weird parts of the law, it says that any communication that is over 180 days old and still on a server is considered "abandoned" so that the government can access it without a warrant. Think about that in this era when you keep all your communications online. It was written when lawmakers thought people would "download" the messages off a server. That's just the most noteworthy problem -- there are all sorts of different definitions based on messages that have been opened or not opened and other oddities as well, almost none of which make sense.Last year we noted that more than half of the House was co-sponsoring a bill put forth by Reps. Kevin Yoder and Jared Polis to reform ECPA in a big way. But even with so many supporting the law, it failed to move. A big hurdle? Both the IRS and SEC (note: not your standard law enforcement agencies) like the fact that they can use ECPA to snoop through electronic communications (without a warrant -- which those agencies can't get on their own anyway).Yoder and Polis are back again with another attempt , and it's matched by a similar legislation in the Senate from Senators Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee. To get attention for the bill, Yoder, Polis and some other supporters took to Twitter in a bit of a meme fest, highlighting some historical facts to demonstrate just how long it's been since ECPA became law. It's worth scrolling through them all (though, there are a lot), because some are pretty funny:At this point, it's a complete travesty that such a bill hasn't become law. People have explained the need for it for well over a decade, and more than half of Congress was signed on to co-sponsor it in the last Congressional term. Already this new bill has 228 additional co-sponsors in the House and another 6 co-sponsors in the Senate. The IRS and SEC's objections are simply ridiculous. Having more convenient access to someone's emails is no excuse for not better protecting the privacy of our online communications.Of course, this isn't the only effort going on to protect privacy. Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Ted Poe and Suzan DelBene have also introduced a bill to update ECPA . It's pretty clear that Congress knows that the law needs to be updated, and it's time to get past whatever objections there are and actually start protecting our privacy.

Filed Under: communications, ecpa, ecpa reform, email, irs, jared polis, kevin yoder, memes, mike lee, patrick leahy, privacy, sec, suzan delbene, ted poe, zoe lofgren