Federal agencies objected on Wednesday to increasing privacy protections for Americans under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
In a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, representatives of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission all expressed concerns about a proposed update to the 1986 act governing the procedures that authorities must follow to obtain Americans’ communications, including digital communication.
The most notable among them was the FTC, the agency tasked with the protection of consumer rights, such as privacy. In statement, the agency said it was worried that revising the act could impede its civil investigations.
“Under recent legislative proposals, however, to compel content from an ECPA service provider, the government would have to obtain a criminal warrant, which is not available to the FTC,” the agency said.
The law, which has not been updated to reflect digital communication, allows agencies to seize certain communication information without showing probable cause.
Privacy advocates criticized the agencies for their statements. “The FTC’s testimony is carefully crafted to sound reasonable, but the agency is simply helping to obstruct the major privacy reform of our generation,” TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said in a statement.
Bartlett Cleland, vice of president for innovation and technology at the American Legislative Exchange Council, criticized the federal government more broadly. “Today’s hearing has exposed the desire of government agencies … to strip U.S. citizens of their guaranteed constitutional rights so that government expansion can propel forward,” Cleland told the Washington Examiner. “What the government has asked for is nothing short of a radical revision of our guaranteed liberties.”
Despite the opposition, the proposed revision, authored by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and co-authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has broad bipartisan support in Congress.
“The overwhelming majority of the American people … can agree that the government ought to have a warrant before it goes after your e-mail, the content of your e-mail. This is a very simple principle that ought not be all that difficult to legislate,” Lee said in his comments to the committee.
Referencing the opposition of the federal agencies to modernizing warrant requirements, Lee said, “I think the overwhelming majority of the American people would be disturbed.”
