There is renewed hope on Capitol Hill that lawmakers may get around to updating a 30-year-old privacy law that allows the government to read citizens’ old emails without a warrant.
On Wednesday, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), announced that the panel would mark up the Email Privacy Act with an eye on advancing the bill in March to a full House vote.
“It’s clear that the law needs to be modernized and updated to ensure it keeps pace with ever-changing technologies so that we protect Americans’ constitutional rights and provide law enforcement with the tools they need for criminal investigations in the digital age,” Chairman Goodlatte said.
The Email Privacy Act would close a loophole in the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) that allows the government to access messages stored online for six months on a third party server. It would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before reading any such correspondence.
Despite having more than 300 cosponsors in the House, the measure had been stalled since last year, facing opposition from civil law enforcement agencies. During testimony last September before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Elana Tyrangiel, head of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy, told lawmakers that the DOJ “remains concerned about the effect a blanket warrant requirement.”
She claimed that “civil investigators enforcing civil rights, environmental, antitrust, and a host of other laws would be left unable to obtain stored communications content from providers” if the legislation was approved.
Representatives with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also appeared at the hearing, lodging similar complaints about changes that were being discussed by the committee as part of the ECPA Amendments Act; companion legislation to the bill Goodlatte is set to consider.
Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking member of the judiciary committee, countered those arguments during the proceedings. “We want these agencies to be effective, but they must abide by the same constitutional constraints that apply to everyone else,” he said.
One of the 25 co-sponsors of the ECPA Amendments Act, Leahy welcomed the Wednesday news about its House counterpart.
“This legislation has been held up too long by some who seek to exempt civil regulatory agencies from the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement,” he said in a statement issued alongside fellow ECPA Amendments Act co-sponsor, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). “Updating our digital privacy laws is long overdue and passing this bill should be a no-brainer,” the two added.
