House Panel Approves Bill To Protect Older Email From Gov't Snooping (usatoday.com)

Erin Kelly, reporting for USA TODAY: A key House panel voted Wednesday to pass an email privacy bill that would stop the government from being able to read Americans' old emails without a warrant. The House Judiciary Committee voted 28-0 to approve the Email Privacy Act, a bipartisan bill that would replace a 1986 law that allows government investigators to peruse emails at will if the communications are at least six months old. The bill would require federal officials to obtain a warrant before they can read or view emails, texts, photos or instant messages -- regardless of when the data was sent. "Today is a great day for not only the Fourth Amendment advocates who have fought long and hard to move the Email Privacy Act, but also for all Americans, who are one step closer to having private and secure digital communications," said Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., the lead sponsor of the bill along with Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.

Comments

Why should the age matter in the first place?

[sims 2]

If I kept a diary no one would expect that entries older than six months were not still personal and private.

How is my private communication any different?

Re:Why should the age matter in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason is that email worked different back then.

Back then, you would pull your email off the server and it would be off the server. Old emails could then be considered 'abandoned' which removes your rights to it.

Trouble is, that practice changed and the law didn't change to reflect that.

Or...

[PvtVoid]

Just store your old emails locally, instead of with your mail provider. Unless the provider logs everything, for all time, they can't cough it up, even with a warrant.

Re:Or...

[sims 2]

This is warrantless search we are talking about. The gov't would still be able to get anything they wanted to know with a warrant same as always.

Email is not in anyway a public forum. Your Facebook wall however with your 3,531 "friends" is fairly public.

What if all the pictures on your phone (on many they are automaticity backed up to the cloud) were to be automatically forwarded to your local police dept if you didn't delete them after six months just in case lets Assume its not their job to look at them but they could if they wanted to without having to ask anyone.

Would that also be ok?

Not for long...

[the_xaqster]

This wont last long. The FBI, NSA and probably half a dosen other agencies will start to cry "but terrorism!!11!!!"

I bet Hillary likes this...

[jnaujok]

...as it would make all of the evidence against her in ServerGate inadmissible.

Re:I bet Hillary likes this...

[jittles]

Not that I have a full understanding of the whole private email server fiasco (TLDR requested), but either she was indited for a crime and a warrant could legally be issued for said emails, or there wasn't just cause, in which case these privacy protections would prevent officers from going on a fishing trip. What are you arguing for exactly?

This. "Servergate" seems to be largely being propagated by people who don't seem to know how email works. If I'm allowed to access, for example, classified emails from a personal device, then they are, by defnition, copied to that device. Whether that device is a "server" or not is utterly irrelevant.

Your opinion is obviously propagated by someone who does not understand how information security works at that level. At no time was Hillary Clinton authorized to send these documents to her private email server. That's why Hillary first asked for an approved Blackberry device from the NSA. They said no, she threw a fit and then illegally disseminated the email to her private server. Even if the email was not marked as classified, she's not off the hook. The rules clearly state that if you believe that the information could or should be classified then you must treat it as such. If you did exactly as she did, you'd already be in jail. Trust me. I used to have to deal with this sort of thing. People who have to deal with this sort of thing are briefed on the rules annually. She knew or should have known that she was violating the rules.

Re:no parallel construction act?

[mi]

without criminalizing and prosecuting parallel construction [...]

Parallel construction is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem. Yes, it can be abused to obtain a warrant dishonestly, but it has legitimate purposes too. It is dangerous, but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it...

we already had privacy... needing a law to say we have privacy actually implies we had LESS privacy.

You are right — we had less. There was a law that diminished our privacy — in contravention with the Constitution. That law could've been abolished by either Supreme Court hearing a concrete case, or by a new law. The former has not occurred in 30 years, the latter just happened. Rejoice.

you're all morons.

No, actually. We're all cows. Moo.

No pine in 1990...

[mi]

I got my first email account in 1990. I'd telnet in (yes, telnet!) and read my email in pine.

Pine was first released in 1992. Elm, perhaps? Or just the good old mail(1)?

Re:Let me guess.

[imidan]

I have not read it yet, but I would guess it has one or more of the following people in it.

Diane Feinstein
Nancy Pelosi
Harry Reid
Lindsey Graham
Mitch McConnell

Notice how, in the title of TFA, this bill has been approved by a House panel? As in, The US House of Representatives? Of the five people you've listed here, four are US Senators. Nancy Pelosi is the one person in your list who is actually a member of the House. Note also that the bill has been passed by the House Judiciary Committee, of which Nancy Pelosi is not a member, so she could not have participated in this vote. Furthermore, she is not listed as a cosponsor of the bill.

There is a related Senate bill, the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2015." None of the cosponsors of that legislation are on your list, either. There's also a House bill corresponding to that Senate bill, which also does not include Pelosi as a cosponsor.

Did you just vomit out a list of politicians that you dislike? This information is in the public record. It's pointless to 'guess' about facts that you can easily look up.

The requested TL;DR

[Voyager529]

Hillary had her own private e-mail server.
Hillary used that private e-mail server for government communication.
Some of that communication was classified, and wasn't handled as such.
Hillary did not turn over the server at the end of her tenure as Secretary of State (a condition of the rules allowing the use of a non-government server).
When prompted about the server because of Benghazi, Hillary denied access to the server until quite some time later.
When she did, she printed the e-mails out on paper, instead of delivering digital copies.
There is at least one documented case of intentionally having safeguards of classified data circumvented.

Questions circling:
What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a technical standpoint?
What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a political standpoint?
Exactly what documents were classified, and when (one of the arguments is that some documents were retroactively marked classified)?

You're correct in that the ruling in TFA wouldn't apply to Hillary's case, because Hillary's case involves warrants and subpoenas and other fun documents of that nature, and apply to official government communication. Thus, the ruling in TFA would be superseded by those things anyway.

Re:The requested TL;DR

[jittles]

Questions circling: What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a technical standpoint?

Irrelevant. She's required to undergo annual security training. During that time you are trained to not mix secure systems or networks with insecure systems or networks. If she did not know the rules then that is her fault. She agreed to uphold them and certified that she attended her annual training. If she did not know, it is her fault.

What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a political standpoint?

I don't see how politics fall into this whatsoever. This is purely a criminal matter (the email server). Whether she did anything illegal for political reasons is irrelevant as far as the email server itself goes.

Exactly what documents were classified, and when (one of the arguments is that some documents were retroactively marked classified)?

The fact of the matter is that the document does not have to be marked as classified. If she knew or should have known that the documents were classified then she should have treated the documents as such.

Re:no parallel construction act?

[Kjella]

Parallel construction is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem. Yes, it can be abused to obtain a warrant dishonestly, but it has legitimate purposes too. It is dangerous, but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it...

Parallel construction is far from orthogonal to privacy. It's basically permission to violate your privacy any way they wish, pretend it didn't happen and after the fact come up with an alternate story that doesn't violate your rights. They can just read your emails, listen to your phone calls, open your letters, bug your house, attach a GPS tracker to your car and if they get caught, too bad it's inadmissable. If they don't, a police officer just happened to catch you in the act or they got an anonymous tip or whatever fits their story. You don't get to challenge what really happened, because they'll never tell you.

It's legalized perjury. That whole "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" not applying to the police. And because they don't have to tell it ever, the innocent never get to hear about it either. How can they challenge the constitutionality of something they're not even aware happened? And who is to say they cops didn't add a few more lies to ensure a conviction when they're lying in the first place? It's an insult to both the 4th and 5th amendment, a clever joke like Mr. Smith telling Neo "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?"

Re:no parallel construction act?

[KGIII]

It's not often that I go a day without mud being thrown at me. I kind of like it. I do my best to state the truth and to accept my mistakes and not repeat them. However, I can - and will, tell it like it is. I'm pretty damned on the socialist side (for *very* different reasons than most) and have figured it's a badge of honor to be called an ultraconservative.