A photo of Patrick Leahy
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A proposed digital privacy bill would require government to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain email and information stored in the cloud, according to a report by Wired.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy proposed the bill on Tuesday to replace the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allows government to access information from an ISP without a warrant. Under the current law, the government can acquire information as long as it has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more, according to Wired.
The report says that this act is outdated since at the time it was enacted "email wasn't stored on servers for a long time, but instead was held there briefly on its way to the recipient's inbox." As such, emails stored for more than 6 months were considered abandoned. This law was enacted at a time before smartphones and social networking, and Leahy, who was the lead author of the 1986 law, says these technologies have "outpaced the privacy protections included in the law."
The proposed bill "includes a provision to enhance the cybersecurity of US computer networks, by allowing service providers to voluntarily disclose content to the government that is pertinent to addressing a cyber-attack involving their computer network," according to a statement.
“Since the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was first enacted in 1986, ECPA has been one of our nation’s premier privacy laws,” Leahy said in a statement. “But, today, this law is significantly outdated and outpaced by rapid changes in technology and the changing mission of our law enforcement agencies after Sept. 11. Updating this law to reflect the realities of our time is essential to ensuring that our federal privacy laws keep pace with new technologies and the new threats to our security.”
Several businesses, including Google and Microsoft, requested an update to the law, requiring government to have probable cause to obtain content regardless of age, according to Wired.
Though the proposed bill would require the government to have a warrant to obtain real-time cellphone data, Wired says it would not require authorities to get a warrant to access past cellphone location data of a suspect.
Article Source http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/051811_Proposed_Bill_Demands_Warrant_for_Government_to_Obtain_Email permits to repubish here
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