In fact, ECPA is so out of date that it has left us vulnerable to government snooping in ways most Americans do not appreciate. With the Senate Judiciary Committee considering possible fixes this week, now is a good time to reflect on how technological advances and misguided legal reasoning have eroded the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches of our "papers and effects," which nowadays take forms the Framers could not have anticipated.
Computerworld described ECPA as a law regulating "the interception of data communications, such as electronic mail and bulk data transfers, during transmission and while stored in a computer." According to a Senate report, the legislation was supposed to strike "a fair balance between the privacy expectations of American citizens and the legitimate needs of law enforcement agencies."
Since ordinary paper mail and telephone calls have long enjoyed Fourth Amendment protection, you might think such a law would be unnecessary. But a series of Supreme Court decisions dealing with information held by third parties, including tax, bank and phone records, had left the constitutional status of email highly uncertain.
As a 1976 decision put it, "This Court has held repeatedly that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed." This logic suggests we have no constitutional right to privacy in the personal data we routinely exchange and store via the Internet; hence the need for a statute like ECPA.
Jacob Sullum
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Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a contributing columnist on Townhall.com.
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