Dear Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

On behalf of the millions of members and supporters of Americans for Tax Reform and the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, we write to express our support for the manager’s amendment to S. 356, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2015, which mirrors legislation passed by the House.  We are pleased that the bill does not carve out civil agencies from the warrant requirement, which would have expanded government surveillance power and undermined the purpose of the bill.

Advances in technology over the past 30 years have rendered the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the law that established the standards for government access to private electronic communications, out of date. ECPA was written long before individuals and companies connected with each other electronically and stored information through email and in the cloud.

The manager’s amendment provides a much-­‐needed update to ECPA, so that the law  will reflect reasonable expectations of privacy and constitutional protections for today’s users of electronic communications with respect to emails, texts, notes, photos, and other sensitive information. The bill would end ECPA’s arbitrary “180-­‐day rule,” which permits email communications to be obtained without a warrant after 180 days. The legislation would also reject the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) interpretation of ECPA that the act of opening an email removes it from warrant protection.

The reforms would ratify the Sixth Circuit’s decision in U.S. v. Warshak, which held that email content is protected by the Fourth Amendment, and that law enforcement access thereto requires a probable cause warrant.  Moreover, the changes to ECPA reflect current
practices: DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation policies already require law enforcement officials seeking content to obtain a search warrant, and many service providers will not relinquish their users’ content without one. The legislation also includes a warrant-­‐for-­‐ content rule with limited exceptions.

We urge you to vote in favor of the manager’s amendment to S. 356. The bill modernizes privacy protections for electronic communications so that everyone can send and receive emails without fear that the government will read or seize them without due process.

Sincerely,

Thomas A. Schatz
President, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste

Grover Norquist
President, Americans for Tax Reform