The chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has not reversed course on email privacy and has not proposed to give U.S. agencies access to email and other electronic communications without search warrants, despite a news report to the contrary, an aide to Senator Patrick Leahy said Tuesday.
The Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on House Resolution 2471, a bill related to consumer consent to video service providers, on Nov. 29, and Leahy, the committee’s chairman, has proposed amendments to the bill to address electronic communications privacy, according to information from the committee.
But Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who has pushed for electronic communications to be protected by court-ordered warrants, has not reversed course to propose that more than 20 U.S. agencies have access to email and other electronic communications through simple subpoenas, a Judiciary Committee aide said. CNET on Tuesday reported that Leahy, after law enforcement objections to his earlier position, has proposed amendments that would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies access to electronic communications without court oversight.
Suggestions that Leahy has changed his mind are “off base,” said the Judiciary Committee aide. “Senator Leahy does not support warrantless searches of email content,” the aide added. “He looks forward to updating the nearly 30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and has been working with a myriad of stakeholders to ensure any updates strike the right balance while also protecting the privacy rights of citizens.”
Leahy, in May 2011, introduced the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Acts, which would require that U.S. law enforcement agencies get court-ordered search warrants before accessing electronic data stored with third-party vendors, such as cloud providers.
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/2015528/us-senator-has-not-caved-on-eprivacy-aide-says.html
A report from CNet today claims that a bill up for a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee next week that was supposed to increase privacy protections around our email would instead do the opposite, allowing many federal agencies to gain access to your email without a warrant. However, my reporting suggests the article is inaccurate. Here’s what CNet says:
CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns…. Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.
This would be particularly disturbing in the wake of the scandal surrounding Generals Petraeus and Allen, whose emails were exposed during a wide-ranging and questionable FBI investigation and have brought the discussion of limits on the surveillance state to the fore. But when reached by phone, Patrick Leahy’s spokesperson David Carle bluntly said the article was “wrong.”
The version of the bill that Declan McCullagh excerpts in his report appears to be one of many that have been drafted and passed around, but is not a version that would be considered seriously at a hearing to review the bill next week.
“Senator Leahy does not support broad carve outs for warrantless searches of email content,” says a Senate Judiciary aide. “He remains committed to upholding privacy laws and updating the outdated Electronic Privacy Communications Act.”
A person who has been privy to conversations about the impending bill intended to update privacy protections around digital communications for the modern age said that this was a “snapshot of a discussion point” and that it’s inaccurate to say it’s the version being pushed forward. This particular draft of the bill incorporates amendments suggested by Senator Chuck Grassley who has expressed concern that too much privacy protection for our email could negatively impact safety tasks.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/11/20/report-claiming-senator-leahy-is-about-to-make-email-privacy-even-worse-is-flawed/
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