William Petroski

bpetrosk@dmreg.com

The Iowa Constitution would offer protections against unreasonable searches and seizures of Iowans' electronic communications and data under a constitutional amendment advancing through the Iowa Legislature.

House Joint Resolution 1 has already been approved by the Iowa House and received unanimous support Tuesday in an Iowa Senate subcommittee. The amendment would be made to Section 8 of Article 1, which now protects the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, paper and effects. It would require the issuance of a search warrant based on probable cause for search and seizure of electronic communications and data.

The resolution is supported by lobbyists representing Microsoft Corp.; Google Inc.; Amazon.com; and the Iowa Association for Justice. In addition, the Motion Picture Association of America is monitoring the bill and is listed as undecided. No groups are registered as opposed to the bill.

The Iowa County Attorneys Association is also undecided, but executive director Tom Ferguson said the measure would probably affect some investigations to some degree. One topic that surface at Tuesday's subcommittee meeting was efforts to track persons who use mobile phones by monitoring information from cellphone towers.

Lon Anderson, a lobbyist for Google, told legislators, "My client strongly supports the amendment." If county attorneys have concerns about obtaining digital information, Google would be happy to work with them to address the issues in the state code, he said.

Sen. Nate Boulton, D-Des Moines, who is an attorney, said he has no problems supporting the amendment and he doesn't believe there would be unintended consequences.

"I think we have plenty of case law for other constitutional rights that clarify when law enforcement can have emergency situations and investigations," Boulton said. “Cellphone towers, cellphone calls, should generally be protected and we should have probable cause to get an investigation unless there is some clear emergency."

Changes to the Iowa Constitution must be approved by simple majorities in the House and Senate in two consecutive general assemblies. That means that if lawmakers approve the resolution this year or next, it must be approved again by both chambers after the 2018 election. The proposed amendment would then face approval by a simple majority of Iowa's voters, who could see the proposal on ballots in the November 2020 election at the earliest.