Date: 2016-04-27
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I rise in support of H.R. 699. the Email Privacy Act. This is an important and long negotiated bill that will update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. a law that both protects the privacy of our email communications and provides a critical tool for law enforcement to investigate crime. I want to thank Judiciary Chairman BOB GOODLATE and Ranking Member JOHN CONYERS for their leadership and for working together on this legislation to accomplish the goals of this bill for the benefit and protection of citizens. law enforcement. and communications providers. I am an original cosponsor of this bill. which has 314 cosponsors. enjoying overwhelming bipartisan support. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act. or ECPA. was enacted in 1986. The statute is outdated and provides unjustifiably inconsistent standards for law enforcement access to stored communications. The law was designed at a time when few of us used email or could have imagined a world in which we could securely share information and edit electronic documents online with others. or where businesses could input. store. process. and access all data related to their operation. The outdated. inconsistent. and unclear aspects of this statute undermine both our privacy interests and law enforcement goals. It is critical that we enact the central reforms provided by this bill. For instance. a probable cause standard should apply to the governments ability to compel a communications provider to disclose a customers email messageno matter how old the message is. Currently. the statute requires the government to obtain a warrant based on probable cause to compel disclosure of an email that is in storage for 180 days or less. However. the statute only requires a subpoena for the government to obtain email messages that are older than 180 days. This makes no sense because citizens have the same. reasonable expectation that these stored communications are private. Therefore. we must change the law so that the higher standard applies regardless of the age of these communications. and H.R. 699 would accomplish this. In addition. the law does not adequately protect communications stored "in the cloud" by third parties on behalf of consumers. and a probable cause warrant should be required for government access. ECPA additionally provides a lesser standard for some cloud storage than it does for many communications stored by electronic communications services. To further complicate matters. many companies provide both communications services and remote storage. making the services to the same customer difficult to separate for purposes of determining which standard applies. Applying inadequate and unclear standards to government access to cloud communications undermines consumer confidence in cloud privacy and threatens to hamper the development of this important engine of economic growth. H.R. 699 addresses this issue by providing a clear and consistent probable cause standard for access to the contents of stored communications for which customers have a reasonable expectation of privacy. H.R. 699 would accomplish these fairly straightforward reforms and that is why it has the support of privacy advocates and electronic communications companies. I urge all of my colleagues to support this commonsense. bipartisan measure.