The House voted unanimously on Wednesday to reform a three-decade-old law that allows the federal government to snoop on electronic communications without a warrant.
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The Email Privacy Act had already been assured of passage earlier in the week, with 314 of the chamber’s 435 members signing on as cosponsors. The legislation would amend the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to require law enforcement to obtain warrants before engaging in surveillance of online communication like email. The law presently requires only a subpoena for accessing messages older than 180 days.
The measure will now move to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has been mum about whether he intends to forward the legislation to the full Senate.
Yet Grassley has generally tended to favor limits on surveillance, and the reform has momentum that’s been years in the making. It’s the third consecutive year Congress has seen a proposal for the bill, and its number of cosponsors in the House make it that chamber’s most popular this year.
Opposition comes chiefly from federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission, where officials argue they should not be required to obtain warrants over the course of civil investigations. In congressional testimony in December, SEC Enforcement Director Andrew Ceresney warned the bill “would harm the ability of the SEC and other civil law enforcement agencies to protect those we are mandated to protect.”
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Members of the tech community hailed the legislation’s passage, but added that the text of the current version does not go far enough. “It [removed] key provisions of the proposed bill, such as [a] section requiring notice from the government to the customer when a warrant is served,” advocacy group TechFreedom said in a letter to Congress.
However, the group added, “We are particularly pleased that the bill does not carve out civil agencies from the warrant requirement, which would have expanded government surveillance power and undermined the very purpose of the bill.”
