Legislation to ban the government from reading old emails without a warrant hit a snag Thursday, as Senate Republicans split over an FBI request for expanded powers to subpoena information about email traffic.
That split prompted Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to ask the Senate Judiciary Committee to call off consideration of his bill.
“[W]ith great reluctance, I have requested that Chairman Grassley withdraw the ECPA Amendments Act from the markup agenda until such time as we can proceed without risking that this bill actually decrease the privacy of our citizens,” Lee said in a Thursday statement. He was referring to his bill to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.
Lee’s request is a big setback for his Senate companion bill to the House’s Email Privacy Act, which passed the House unanimously in April. But a committee meeting on the legislation turned into a war of words between Lee and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, who proposed amending the bill to include a provision that would let the FBI gather information without a warrant about emails that have been sent and received.
Cornyn’s amendment would clarify that the FBI can send “national security letters,” which are administrative subpoenas that don’t require judicial review, to Internet providers in order to gain information about potential terrorists exchanging emails.
“I would point out that the National Security Letter here doesn’t open up content,” Cornyn said during the markup. “It’s just IP addresses and email addresses, it’s metadata, and it’s not bulk collection.”
That held no consolation for Lee. “If the government can look into exactly what websites someone is visiting, they can tell a whole lot about that person,” he replied.
Cornyn’s amendment has already passed out of the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of the legislation that authorizes the operations of the U.S. intelligence services. In part because that bill is a “safe bet” to pass, as one senior GOP aide put it, Cornyn’s opponents thought he was being disingenuous and simply trying to kill the bill, even though he co-sponsored the email privacy legislation.
“It strikes me as odd that somebody could call an amendment a poison pill when, I believe, the amendment enjoys the support of a majority of this committee” Cornyn replied. “I believe if the proponents of this bill’s sponsors, they’d be glad to have a vote on this if they thought my amendment would lose, but they know it won’t lose. They know it’s likely to pass.”
But Democrats might filibuster the email privacy bill on the Senate floor if it includes the national security letters amendment. “If we’re going to have controversial issues injected, it’s basically going to tank the bill,” Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., said during the markup.
