Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye. CT. Tea.

Sure. I mean, ECPA is a really important statute. These are the rules that govern how government can get access to all of our electronic communications. So everything that you store online, your photos with, Flickr or your emails with Google, or your text messages with your service provider. All of those things are held by third parties. And the rules that protect them are the rules that are enshrined in law in ECPA. The problem is those rules are 30 years old. They were passed in 1986 before there was a World Wide Web and when Top Gun was the top grossing movie in the movie theaters. So you can imagine that they've actually gotten pretty out of date, and they need to be revisited. They need to be updated. And so that's what that was the impetus for this reform measure. So what exactly then does the Email Privacy Act, or would it reform? So right now, you can imagine back in 1986, Congress didn't have a really clear idea of exactly what they were getting into. I mean, they actually deserve a lot of credit for thinking as far in advance to pass a law in 1986 that still is relevant to our technology today. But, of course, it's gotten out of date. And one of the ways that it's gotten out of date is how it treats the content of communication. So under ECPA, as it's written, the content of our communications actually are only protected by a search warrant. That's the standard for searching your home for the first hundred and eighty days that they're stored in in by a third party. After that, the protection drops down to a subpoena, which a judge never sees and is basically just a a letter from a prosecutor. So what the Email Privacy Act does is normalize all the third party communications. And what it says is no matter how old the content is, no matter what type of content it is, if it's private communication and it's held by a third party, the government must go and get a search warrant

Well, no. I mean, I think that there's a couple of things. I mean, in the big picture, ACPA needs more reform than just the the way content of communication is held. I mean, there's a lot of other things that we now know about communications that we weren't really thinking about in 1986, like things like metadata. So we found that the information about our communications, who we're sending things to, who we're getting stuff from, things like our location information is generated by our cell phone. These are all incredibly revealing pieces of information, and they're they're currently covered by Ecwid but it's not clear they're covered at a high enough level to sort of, you know, given how sensitive they've become and how much information is being collected now. So that's kind of a big picture. And I think everybody agrees that we probably need to do a a more thorough and and longer look at ECPA. In regard to this bill, there's one particular provision that CDT was unhappy to see taken out as were many other groups, including the ACLU, and that's the notice provision. In the bill as written, you have the government would have to notify you after they issued a search warrant on your account. So they'd have to let you know that they they did this search. And that you can imagine the analogy to the real world. Right? When law enforcement comes and knocks on your door, you know about it. You know that a search is happening. If there's a police officer at my door, I know about it. Yeah. That that's exactly right. And and you you can imagine not just for practical reasons, but for good, you know, civil liberties reasons, you'd want that. Right? I mean, this is about the most invasive thing that can happen to you. The government is looking through your communications and thinking that you might have committed a crime. So you can imagine why you'd wanna notify people. You know, law enforcement did absolutely and categorically did not want to do that. They categorically did not wanna provide that notice. Local law enforcement said that they would, you know, that there would be too much of a burden, and they were really willing to to throw themselves bodily in front of the bill and keep it from advancing through the house. So what we did was we what we think is work a fairly clever workaround, And that's what we've said in the bill is law enforcement will not have to notify the individual, but the provider still can notify the individual. So and that's permissive. So if someone is searching my Gmail account, Google can tell me about it. And in many cases right now, providers do tell people. So that notification is happening. So it's something that we think, in practice at least, we're still getting a substantial amount of protection. And it was a compromise we we felt like we needed to make to pass the bill. And that seems like something that would play along,

when there are searches happening. Yeah. I I mean, it's certainly something that we're seeing in a in a lot of areas. I mean, companies are really stepping forward in in providing notice to customers and providing more transparency about when searches are happened. So it's something really in the last five or six years, we've seen a real increased corporate responsibility in this area. Sure. So

I mean, we're we're optimistic. I mean, as I had one meeting earlier this week, someone said, well, four nineteen to nothing. You certainly got our attention. So, I mean and that's and that's true. Right? I mean, there you you don't find post offices to that get named with that level of unanimity and and support. So it it really speaks to the fact that this is an incredibly popular issue. It's something that your average American is is shocked by when they find out that their email doesn't have the same protection as their physical mail that they got through The US mail. So that being said, the senate is a slow process. Because because of the way the senate works and senate rules, any senator under the senate rules can actually make any piece of legislation take a long time to pass. So what I mean by that is if one single senator objects to a piece of legislation, they can particular piece of legislation, as long as a week's worth of floor time to pass an individual measure. That's why you so often see measures in congress bundle together into bigger bills because it can take a very long time to pass them individually. So there is a lot of enthusiasm for this bill. We're also aware that some of the things that concerns that have been been expressed from law enforcement haven't necessarily gone away. They don't they don't wanna do this bill necessarily. We've had continuing concerns from things like the federal civil agencies who say they don't have warrant authority. And so, you know, they they feel that this bill might harm their investigations, though we we disagree with that. So we have those objections out there. It's our job now to go around to all the senate offices, explain to them why we think this bill should pass, especially get support from people like chairman Grassley, the chairman of the senate judiciary committee, and the senate leadership, and say, hey. This is something that needs to happen in this congress. We need our supporters to be mobilized to be delivering that message. And we think if we do that, we will be able to find an opportunity to get this bill through. Yeah. And you said at this congress, I mean, the shot clock is kind of on for you on this one, it would seem like. Yeah. It's an extraordinarily abbreviated legislative session this year. I mean, because the congression because the political campaigns for president and the political conventions are in the July, Congress is actually going out very early. Usually, they go through the first week in August. They're getting out after the second week in July this year. So, basically, once we get to the July, the congressional session is over except for a little bit of time in September and a little bit of time after the election. So, yes, we have an abbreviated time frame and we're pushing very hard. Right.

Apparently, it's coming up again. Can you just share a little bit more about what, you know, agencies like the SEC are asking for here? Sure. I I mean, it's it's fairly technical, but actually also really important. Okay. So what the SEC and and all other federal agencies are saying is we don't we can't get a search warrant because we're not law enforcement entities. We don't we can't put you in jail. We investigate and prosecute civil violations of the law. So you don't get search warrants for civil violations of the law. And and so they feel like by updating ECPA and saying you should only get a search warrant, that that's gonna keep them from doing their job. We don't actually think that's the case. The law doesn't affect the SEC or any other agency's ability to go directly to the target of investigation, for example. So if you if the SEC has done something, you thinks you have done something wrong, they issue what's called a subpoena, which makes means you're responsible for giving them all the documents that they ask for, including searching for those documents in the cloud or in your Gmail box. You're not forgiven from doing that just because they're covered by ECPA. And there's a lot of tools that a judge can do to use to punish you if you don't make that search. And so we think they've got a lot of tools to do what they need to do now. And the reason that we're we're resisting what you know, obviously, the SEC and the IRS and lots of civil agencies have an important job to do. But the reason we think it's so important that they not have some kind of exception to this rule is because of the scope of their authority. The reality is that there are tens of thousands of civil agencies in this country. It's not just federal civil agencies, it's state civil agencies. It's the state health inspector, you know, the state building inspector. Really, a lot of agencies across the country. They also there are also a lot of civil laws. You can violate the civil law doing just about anything. If you fill out your taxes wrong, even if you haven't committed a crime, if they the IRS thinks that you might have claimed that vacation as a business expense, that's a civil violation of the law. We can't build a a legal framework that allows the IRS to read your email anytime they think there's even the most minor violation of the law. That would we would end up with a place where the fourth amendment wouldn't mean anything because it would be so easy to to circumvent it and get access to that information.

hey. I used to be able I used to store that in my file cabinet at home. Now I'm storing it in the cloud. It should have the same legal protections. And that's the underlying thrust of the whole bill. That makes sense. You also mentioned law enforcement opposition,

pinpointing as problematic? Well, I mean, we've already talked about the notice provision. We think, honestly, that's the the piece of the bill that was most directly affected them. And we think, honestly, that that by making that change, they should be willing to accept it. They've also raised concerns about the way ECPA is structured. The way it works right now, when when there's an emergency under the law, law enforcement goes to the provider, the person who holds the information, says we have an emergency, and then the provider voluntarily turns that information over to them. There are many law enforcement who say that shouldn't be shouldn't be voluntary. Instead, it should be mandatory. If we say there's an emergency, that should be enough, and that should be the end of discussion. And while that has some appeal, I mean, the reality is that when we look at the transparency reports that the providers issue, we find that in about 30% of the cases, those emergencies are actually not emergencies. Mhmm. And when providers push back and say, this doesn't sound like an emergency, law enforcement actually backs away and information doesn't end up being turned over. So if we change the presumption here and it's just an emergency is an emergency, we already know we'd see over reporting. We'd see law enforcement using that as a way as a loophole to sidestep the warrant requirements and just get information, you know, in a faster and by claiming it was an emergency. So we we don't wanna build that loophole into the law either. Alright. That makes sense. Well, it sounds like all you need to do is fight back these proposals,