[governance] Justice Department Backs Closing Loophole For Government E-mail Snooping #Privacy #Cyber Security #ECPA

Wed Mar 20 19:34:14 EDT 2013

Dear All,

Read this on the Threat Post - the Kaspersky Lab Security News Services and
found it interesting. I have copied the Article here but if you want to
read it from the site directly:

Source:
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/justice-department-backs-closing-loophole-government-e-mail-snooping-031913?utm_source=Newsletter_032013&utm_medium=Email+Marketing&utm_campaign=Newsletter&CID=&CID=

Starts

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday joined a chorus of privacy advocates
supporting changes to a 1986 law that currently allows the government to
review some emails without a warrant.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was created before commercial
e-mail existed, let alone became a primary form of communications. As
currently written, the ECPA allows U.S. law enforcement to read someone's
emails with just a subpeona from a federal prosecutor if the email is older
than six months or is already opened. All others require a warrant from a
judge.

"There is no principled basis to treat e-mail less than 180 days old
differently than e-mail more than 180 days old," Elana Tyrangiel, acting
assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Policy, testified before a House judiciary subcommittee.
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Technology companies such as Google and Twitter also back changes to limit
government access to citizen's e-mails by requiring court-ordered searches
only.

"The distinctions that ECPA made in 1986 were foresighted in light of
technology at the time. But  in 2013, ECPA frustrates users’ reasonable
expectations of privacy," said Richard Salgado, Google's director of law
enforcement and information security, before the same
subcommittee<https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwxyRPFduTN2eTQ1RVJXTGd3eTg/edit?pli=1>.
"Users expect, as they should, that the documents they store online have
the same Fourth Amendment protections as they do when the government wants
to enter the home to seize documents stored in a desk drawer. There  is no
compelling policy or legal rationale for this dichotomy.

He later added, "ECPA worked well for many years, and much of it remains
vibrant and relevant. In significant places, however, a large gap has grown
between the technological assumptions made in ECPA and the reality of how
the Internet works today. This leaves us, in some circumstances, with
complex and baffling rules that are both difficult to explain to users and
difficult to apply."

The movement to amend the law to reflect today's concerns is being led by
the legislation's original author -- Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee.

"When I led the effort to write ECPA 27 years ago, email was a novelty. No
one could have imagined the way the Internet and mobile technologies would
transform how we communicate and exchange information today. Three decades
later, we must update this law to reflect the realities of our time, so
that our federal privacy laws keep pace with American innovation and the
changing mission of our law enforcement agencies,” he said in a published
report<http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-congress-legislation-email-privacy-laws-20130319,0,7308454.story?track=rss>
.

Richard Littlehale, who leads an investigative unit of the Tennessee Bureau
of Investigation, testified that the law as written has assisted child
pornography investigations. He believes the privacy issue to be
"oversstated."

"The truth is that no one has put forward any evidence of pervasive law
enforcement abuse of ECPA provisions," Littlehale told the House
panel, according
to the Associated
Press.<http://hosted2.ap.org/RIPRJ/f7ded15e4d4846268a17b79c1c4b7cb8/Article_2013-03-19-US-Email%20Privacy/id-06b87118f3e1478c923d7e40f6177232>

Commenting on this Article will be automatically closed on June 19, 2013.
Ends

-- 
Salanieta Tamanikaiwaimaro aka Sala
P.O. Box 17862
Suva
Fiji

Twitter: @SalanietaT
Skype:Salanieta.Tamanikaiwaimaro
Tel: +679 3544828
Fiji Cell: +679 998 2851
Blog: salanieta.blogspot.com
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