The United States is engaged in a fight of “epic proportions,” according to Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), as it pertains to the Fourth Amendment and Americans’ liberties. And the seizure of electronic communications is yet another affront on the right to privacy.
Addressing Heritage Action’s Conservative Policy Summit, the Arizona Republican, who has been a leader in the House on Fourth Amendment protections, spoke about further assaults on the right to privacy, specifically as it relates to text messages, emails and picture messages.
“Today we find ourselves in a fight of epic proportions as it relates to our individual liberties and their preservation,” Salmon said Monday. “Day after day we see news story after news story chronicling the damaging effects of our out of control surveillance state.”
Last May, Salmon introduced the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act, which received bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. Salmon’s bill seeks to increase Fourth Amendment protections for emails and other means of electronic communications after the Internal Revenue Service issued a ruling stating citizens do not have an expectation of privacy for such mediums.
According to the ruling, agencies throughout the federal government now have the ability to seize emails stored by service providers for more than 180 days without a warrant.
For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Paul Rosenzweig, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said, can access emails sent within a company more than six months ago during an investigation into insider trading.
The ability for the federal government to do so, Salmon stated, is an infringement on the right to privacy afforded to all Americans.
“A republic demands transparency from the government and privacy for its citizens,” he said Monday. “Today, we have reversed that, with government demanding transparency from us but insisting on secrecy for itself.”
Salmon’s bill — Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a companion bill in the Senate — requires the government to obtain a search warrant before obtaining access to correspondence conducted through electronic communications. Additionally, the legislation eliminates the 180-day rule upheld by the IRS.
“Clearly, there is a need to ensure the privacy of personal emails,” the Arizona Republican said. “In the ever-changing world of our technology, our laws must be updated to ensure our Constitutional rights are protected regardless of what mode of communication we use.”
Salmon went on to call emails, text messages and picture messages the “snail mail” of our time.
Rosenzweig noted the constitutional basis for the Fourth Amendment, namely the searching and reading of private correspondence. But today, email storage systems and cloud-based mail services have become the “post office of the future,” he said at the Conservative Policy Summit.
“The equivalent of what we’re looking at today is a search of the desk in your house where you keep your personal love letters from your husband or your wife or the personal mail to your daughter or you father or your mother,” Rosenzweig said Monday. “But now, instead of storing them in my desk, I store them in the cloud on Gmail or with Microsoft or Yahoo.”
Salmon encouraged conservatives to rebuke the government’s surveillance programs, including those implemented beyond the scope of the National Security Agency. And lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have joined forces to rein in both the federal government and the spy agency.
“The fact is, as usual, when you give the government an inch, they take a mile,” Salmon said. “We simply can’t afford to play around with our most basic, fundamental human right.”
