Skip to main content

Congress yanks warrantless e-mail tapping protections just before Christmas

Congress decided to kill an amendment to an older piece of legislation that would have prevented authorities from viewing a person's email messages without obtaining a warrant.

Join us in Atlanta on April 10th and explore the landscape of security workforce. We will explore the vision, benefits, and use cases of AI for security teams. Request an invite here.


Google privacy violation

Congress decided to kill an amendment to an older piece of legislation that would have prevented authorities from viewing a person’s e-mail messages without obtaining a warrant.

The amendment would have been applied to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it was originally included in the same vote that allowed Netflix users to link their viewing data with their Facebook account, which the Senate successfully passed last week.  We don’t know exactly why Congress yanked the e-mail protections, but my guess is that it wanted to take a more substantial look at the issue.

Federal authorities can currently collect e-mail messages and data from cloud services that’s stored on a third-party server for at least 180 days. Right now, no warrant is currently needed to obtain this information, and authorities only need to claim that such private data is important to an (any) ongoing investigation.

VB Event

The AI Impact Tour – Atlanta

Continuing our tour, we’re headed to Atlanta for the AI Impact Tour stop on April 10th. This exclusive, invite-only event, in partnership with Microsoft, will feature discussions on how generative AI is transforming the security workforce. Space is limited, so request an invite today.
Request an invite

Lets hope the next body of congress can hammer out a real solution to online privacy before 2014.

Via AllGov

VB Daily - get the latest in your inbox

Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here.

An error occured.