News & Commentary

In 1986, there was no World Wide Web, nobody carried a cell phone, and the president was a man born in 1911. That was the year that the statute that protects the privacy of your electronic life — email, search terms, cloud computing, cell phone location records, postings to Facebook — was passed into law. Even then, Congress recognized that computerized record-keeping would pose privacy issues as information that had formally resided in the home (and been protected by the Fourth Amendment) moved to the hands of businesses. Today, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which should safeguard electronic communications records (like your email or chat logs) and the information you share with companies (like Google documents or social networking posts), is in serious need of an update. Fortunately, the ACLU isn’t alone in that opinion. Other civil liberties groups and major corporations like Google, Microsoft and AT&T agree. That’s why we’ve all joined together to ask Congress to reform ECPA. We all believe that law enforcement should have to go to a judge and get a warrant that says it has probable cause to believe you’ve committed a crime before it can read your email, browse through your social networking account, or track your location. This is precisely what the Framers of the Constitution intended. The Fourth Amendment recognized citizens of a democracy need privacy for their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Two hundred years ago, those papers would have been in our homes and firmly protected by the Constitution. The fact that they are now held on the servers of private companies doesn’t change the principle governing o

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Yes. I firmly believe they are, and I’m not the only one. An employee at London’s Heathrow Airport probably understands better than I do.  After accidentally stepping into a body scanner, her colleague made a lewd comment about the practically nude image that appeared on the screen.   When I read the story, I imagined what it would be like for my grandmother to endure a similar situation, or my 15-year-old cousin.  No one should be subjected to so invasive and potentially embarrassing a search without probable cause.    Watch a newsclip on the incident below.