Senate Committee Approves Stricter Email Privacy

New submitter DJ Jones sent in good news in the attempts to update privacy rights for stored electronic communication. From the article: "The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a bill that would strengthen privacy protection for e-mails by requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant from a judge in most cases before gaining access to messages in individual accounts stored electronically. The bill is not expected to make it through Congress this year and will be the subject of negotiations next year with the Republican-led House." The EFF seems pretty happy with the proposed changes, but notes that the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history.

Comments

Re:I am okay with the Netflix change

[Trepidity]

Media distribution is a bit different from search engines, because it requires licensing deals for the content to distribute, which are often exclusive. It'd be one thing if Netflix and Company B both distributed all the major films, and you got to choose which platform you preferred based on criteria such as privacy, quality of the software, price, customer service, etc. But in practice the media business is all based around exclusive licensing deals, so for any given movie, you will be able to get it from Netflix, or from Company B, but will not have a choice of both. And what's likely is over the medium term one of those two will come out on top, as they collect all the good deals and drive the other one out of business.

There are possible ways to deal with it, mostly by laws against exclusivity deals or "tying", but in a market that allows tying you end up with those kinds of lack of perfect competition.

Because of Petreaus

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Here's an example of how legal protections for privacy only get enacted when someone powerful gets screwed.

The timing sure makes this look like a reaction to the Petreaus scandal. From the news reports it sounds like the only reason Petreaus got caught is because of what had been basically carte blanche for the FBI to dig through any webmail system. Under normal circumstances the FBI should not have been investigating random threatening emails to a civilian - it was only because the civilian knew an FBI agent that wanted to bone her that the FBI even got involved. It seems implausible that a judge would have issued a warrant under those circumstances, but the FBI didn't need one under current law.

It's been 25 years, long enough that most people don't remember Robert Bork's supreme court nomination casuing his video rental records to become embarrasingly public and ultimately resulting in the passage of the Video Privacy Protection Act. So its not much of a surprise that the VPPA is getting dismantled - despite the actual threat being worse today since everything is in massive centralized databases now instead of paper records in a local store.

Re:National Security letters

[b4dc0d3r]

Didn't bother to read?

Service providers would be prohibited from handing over e-mail, and Mr. Leahy would get rid of the strange 180-day rule that the government can now use to compel disclosure. To access any e-mail content, law enforcement officers would be required to obtain a search warrant from a judge after demonstrating probable cause. The amendments would also oblige officials to give those whose e-mail they are reading a copy of the search warrant.

NSL are optional, as optional as strong-arm tactics can be, and typically require a lawsuit to fight back. If providers are prohibited, NSL carries no weight - they simply respond "I can't, that's illegal."

For the reading impaired: It doesn't mean providers *will not* hand over info with just a letter, it means the ones who care will point out that it's not that simple.