14 DAY TRIAL // Dozens of tech giants have decided to fight against the US government’s desire to violate people’s privacy, asking them to vote on the bill that gives more privacy protection to their users’ information stored on their servers.
The list includes many companies, including Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Apple, Automattic, DuckDuckGo, Evernote, Foursquare, HP, Intuit, LinkedIn, Reddit, as well as plenty of advocates.
The group signed a letter sent to the House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and to the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, asking them to bring to the floor the bipartisan Leahy-Lee bill S.607, which updates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), as well as the H.R. 1852 bipartisan Yoder-Polis bill.
“Updating ECPA would respond to the deeply held concerns of Americans about their privacy. S. 607 would make it clear that the warrant standard of the US Constitution applies to private digital information just as it applies to physical property,” the letter reads.
They go to on say that the new bill would help US companies in seeking to innovate and compete at a global level, and it would eliminate “outdated discrepancies between the legal process for government access to data stored locally in one’s home or office and the process for the same data stored with third parties in the Internet cloud.”
The group warns that the only resistance to this reform comes from civil regulatory agencies that want an exception that allows them to obtain the content of customer documents and communications directly from third-party service providers, which would only serve to expand government power.
The bill was approved by the Judiciary Committee last year and has been waiting to be passed since May 2013.
What is ECPA
Under the ECPA, government agencies can demand service providers to hand over their users’ personal data that’s being stored on their servers. The outdated legislation allows police to make warrantless searches of people’s emails and other information that’s stored on the cloud if said info is older than 180 days.
Back when the bill was approved, in 1988, email storage space was small and people deleted them more frequently. Nowadays, everyone has years upon years of messages in their inboxes, data that’s completely open to government searches without even needing a warrant.
ECPA itself was an amendment to Title II of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 which was primarily designed to prevent unauthorized government access to private electronic communications.