CCIA is proud to be involved in the new Vanishing Rights grassroots effort
that has just been launched by a number of NGOs aimed at convincing Congress to
update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). As I’ve written a
number of times in the past in this blog, ECPA is a law from 1986 that dictates
the circumstances in which the government may demand access to citizen’s email
and other documents stored online from the service provider. In many cases the
law provides access to the government using process far short of the probable
cause warrant standard that applies in the offline world. CCIA has been working
diligently to fix this oversight in the law, because it is good for business
and because it is the right thing to do.
This new campaign comes at a time where Congress is finally starting to pay attention
to this situation. Senator Leahy is planning to have the Senate Judiciary
Committee mark up a bill that would fix some of the most glaring problems with
ECPA after Thanksgiving. At the same time, a number of other members of
Congress have introduced provisions that would fix various parts of the 1986
law. Rep. Zoe Lofgren has a bill to require warrants for content online, and
Senator Wyden and Rep. Jason Chaffetz have one that would require a warrant for
location information taken from a cell phone, just to provide two examples. We
applaud all of these Members for their foresight, and we call upon their
colleagues to pass some form of warrant protection online as soon as possible.
The Vanishing Rights effort should help move that goal closer. It calls upon
people throughout the country to contact their representatives, particularly if
they live in states whose Senators sit on the Judiciary Committee. A popular
outpouring of support for the proposal could help move these bills forward and
that is why CCIA is supporting Vanishing Rights and encouraging the Congress to
take up this topic.
