[LINK] digitaldueprocess.org

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Technology Coalition Seeks Stronger Privacy Laws

By MIGUEL HELFT  www.nytimes.com  Published: March 30, 2010
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/technology/31privacy.html>


SAN FRANCISCO — A broad coalition of technology companies, including 
AT&T, Google and Microsoft, and advocacy groups from across the political 
spectrum said Tuesday that it would push Congress to strengthen online 
privacy laws to protect private digital information from government 
access. 

 <http://digitaldueprocess.org>

The group, calling itself the Digital Due Process coalition, said it 
wanted to ensure that as millions of people moved private documents from 
their filing cabinets and personal computers to the Web, those documents 
remained protected from easy access by law enforcement and other 
government authorities. 

The coalition, which includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and 
Technology, wants law enforcement agencies to use a search warrant 
approved by a judge or a magistrate rather than rely on a simple subpoena 
from a prosecutor to obtain a citizen’s online data. 

The group also said that it wanted to safeguard location-based 
information collected by cellphone companies and applications providers. 

Members of the group said that they would lobby Congress for an update to 
the current law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was 
written in 1986, nearly a decade before Internet use became mainstream. 

They acknowledged that some proposals were likely to face resistance from 
law enforcement agencies and the Obama administration. 

Under a proposed set of principles, law enforcement agencies or other 
government representatives would have to obtain a search warrant based on 
a showing of probable cause before they could obtain a person’s e-mail, 
photos or other electronic documents stored in a service like Gmail, 
Flickr or Facebook. 

Under current law, much of that information is accessible through a 
simple subpoena, which can be issued under looser rules. 

Obtaining access to information about where people are located or the 
places they have visited would be protected under the same standard. 

Currently, courts are divided on whether access to location information 
requires a warrant or a subpoena. 

Advocates of the changes said that the new rules were merely intended to 
ensure that protections that Americans have enjoyed in the past remain in 
place as technology evolves. 

“The U.S. Constitution protects data in your home and on your PC very 
strongly,” said Mike Hintze, an associate general counsel at Microsoft. 

“We don’t believe that the balance between privacy and law enforcement 
should be fundamentally turned on its head,” Mr. Hintze added, simply 
because people now choose to store documents online rather than in their 
homes. 

Members of the coalition acknowledged they would probably face 
resistance. This year, Justice Department lawyers argued in court that 
cellphone users had given up the expectation of privacy about their 
location by voluntarily giving that information to carriers. The 
coalition said it expected a long debate before Congress agrees to change 
the law. 

“We are not expecting that these will be enacted this year,” said Jim 
Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and 
Technology. “But it is time to begin the dialog.” 

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said he welcomed the work 
of the coalition and planned to hold hearings on the issue. “While the 
question of how best to balance privacy and security in the 21st century 
has no simple answer, what is clear is that our federal electronic 
privacy laws are woefully outdated,” he said in a statement. 

The coalition said that the new principles would not affect the access of 
private digital information for national security purposes. And they 
would not affect the use of personal information for commercial purposes, 
like marketing, a mounting source of concern among users. 

Some privacy advocates welcomed the proposals but said that they hoped 
that Congress would consider broader protections. 

“We also need some consumer protections against private data being reused 
for commercial purposes,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the 
Electronic Privacy Information Center. 

While some earlier coalitions between industry and advocacy groups have 
failed in their efforts to promote changes in privacy law, Digital Due 
Process is remarkable for its breadth. While it includes groups often 
affiliated with left-leaning causes, like the A.C.L.U. and the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation, it also has libertarian groups like the Progress and 
Freedom Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

The coalition includes rivals, like Google and AT&T, and court 
adversaries. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, is involved 
in longstanding class-action lawsuit against AT&T over the company’s 
participation in a plan by the National Security Agency to monitor the 
private communications of consumers. 

Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier 
Foundation, said that members of the coalition disagreed on several 
issues, but he added, “We can all agree that this area of the law needs 
to be updated to reflect changes in technology.” 

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Cheers,
Stephen