Digital Victory! Email Privacy Act Moves Forward with Historic Committee Vote

Today the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved H.R. 699, The Email Privacy Act, and sent it to the House floor for consideration. The bill would bring the 1986 Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) into the 21st century by requiring the government to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause before seizing any content stored online with third parties, such as emails stored with an email provider or documents in cloud storage. This would bring ECPA in line with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment and with Americans’ modern expectations of privacy, who now store online the files and communications they used to store only in their homes and offices.

New America’s Open Technology Institute this morning joined with over 50 other organizations, including companies, civil society, and academics, to urge the House Judiciary Committee to approve the bill. That same coalition has worked for years to reach this day, and will continue to support electronic privacy reform as this bill moves to the House floor.

The following can be attributed to Ross Schulman, Senior Counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute:

“The time has long since passed to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, and OTI is excited to finally see the House move on this bill that would do so much to protect the private information of Americans. While the latest version of the bill is not perfect and eliminates some important protections that we supported, the new bill still marks a large step forward. OTI calls on the full House, as well as the Senate, to move forward with this bill that has already garnered the support of over 300 cosponsors. OTI also looks forward to Congress continuing to grapple with other important issues of privacy in the digital age, including the still-unresolved issue of cell phone location tracking.”

The following can be attributed to Kevin Bankston, Director of New America’s Open Technology Institute:

“Over six years ago a coalition of privacy organizations and companies joined together to push Congress to act on a simple principle: the data we store in the cloud should be protected against government seizure just as strongly as our physical letters and files are. Today, with this historic, unanimous vote in the House Judiciary Committee after years of wrongheaded obstruction from the government, we are finally and firmly on the path to real Internet privacy reform in the foreseeable future. I and OTI are proud to have been a part of the process that has brought us this far, and we urge that House leadership bring this bill to the floor and that our allies in the Senate act as quickly as possible so that we can build on this hard-fought win. The American people have already waited far too long for a law that will strongly protect the privacy of their digital lives.”