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October 10th, 2015 
Awake Goy 
The Fourth Amendment is under attack in an age of electronic
surveillance and expanding government. The Email Privacy Act, H.R. 699,
and its Senate companion bill S. 356, is marching toward bipartisan
agreement in Congress. The legislation would give government agencies
access to your email, text messages and documents without a warrant from
storage systems like “the Cloud”.
A broader interest in privacy rights
has received national attention in the last few years, since Edward
Snowden revealed that the NSA was spying on American citizens. While Big
Brother isn’t directly knocking on your front door, Big Brother is
knocking on the door to your email account.
The bills tiptoes around the the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits
unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as requires a warrant to be
judiciously sanction.
The Email Privacy Act would allow state agencies
to issue judgeless administrative subpoenas to collect private data
stored on remote devices.
It encourages Big Government to target
minorities that are considered a “threat,” including religious
practitioners, non-profit organizations and government critics.(1)
Warrants are judicial acts, so they cannot be issued by law
enforcements and bureaucrats. Even the Email Privacy Act acknowledges
this fact. Nevertheless, the bills would violate privacy rights by
authorizing extrajudicial administrative subpoenas.(1)
Electronic Communication Privacy Act
The Electronic Communication Privacy Act was written in 1986, prior
to development of the World Wide Web.
The bill was intended to protect
the privacy of the few Americans who were using electronic mail. Storing
email after it was sent was a mild nuisance at the time, since online
storage was limited and costly.
The government, therefore, cooked up a
law that would allow them to obtain electronic emails without a warrant.
They could collect data on remote devices or third-party sources,
provided that the data was over 180 days old.
The Electronic
Communication Privacy Act has been resuscitated in the form of the Email
Privacy Act.(2)
There are no limits to the privacy rights enshrined by the Fourth
Amendment, and it was not meant to be updated with the rise of various
technologies. Regardless, the Email Privacy Act allows the subpoena of
every single citizen and organization, excluding email storage
providers.
Data gathered from third-party sources
If there is a time to delete personal emails, documents and text
messages that you would like kept private, that time is now.
Unfortunately, deleting your private emails may not completely decimate
that information.
The government can grant itself access to your data
without a search warrant provided that it has crossed U.S. electronic
devices at some time. If you sent an email to Canada or Iceland in the
last six months, for example, the government would have access to that
email.
If you delete the email, the government can still retrieve it,
provided that copies of the email were picked up by third-party sources.
These third-party sources would violate your privacy in the name of
security.(3)
This last June, members of Congress voted 255-174 for an amendment by
Representatives Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., which
would prohibit intelligence agencies from drawing on federal funding to
collect data about American citizens.
It was the second time within the
last two years that the House has voted on the bill. This bill closely
followed the passing of the USA Freedom Act, which is ostensibly
supposed to end the NSA’s collection of phone records.(3)
The right to private email correspondence without fear of government
surveillance is a basic extension of the Fourth Amendment.
Unfortunately, the bill has the real potential for bipartisan passage in
Congress even though it stands in direct contradiction to the Fourth
Amendment.
Big Brother wants to keep tabs on you. Judge-less administered
subpoenas must be stopped.
October 9, 2015 – KnowTheLies.com
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