OTI Supports the Reintroduction of the Email Privacy Act
Press Release
WOCintech
Jan. 9, 2017
Today, Congressmen Yoder and Polis reintroduced the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 387) for the 115th Congress. This bill, which passed the House of Representatives unanimously last year, amends the 30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 to require law enforcement to get a search warrant based on probable cause before demanding the content of communications stored online with third parties such as email providers, social networks and cloud storage services. This bill would bring the law into line with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment and the modern privacy expectations of people who increasingly store private communications, documents and pictures in the Internet ‘cloud’ and expect that their information will be safe against unreasonable searches and seizures. New America’s Open Technology Institute supports the Email Privacy Act.
The following statement can be attributed to Ross Schulman, Senior Counsel at OTI.
“The Open Technology Institute and its staff have worked for years to see a bill like the Email Privacy Act become law. After last year’s landmark vote in the House of Representatives, the common sense protections for our digital liberties that are embodied in the bill should be easy for Congress to agree on. We applaud Representatives Yoder and Polis, as well as their cosponsors, for continuing to fight for these strong privacy measures and look forward to another unanimous vote in the House and for the Senate to take up this important legislation and pass it without delay.”