Email Privacy Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. YODER. I thank the chairman.

Mr. Speaker, today is a great day for the Constitution. It is a great day for the spirit of bipartisanship in this Chamber. It is a great day for Americans everywhere who use modern technology, such as emails and text messages and cell phones, to communicate with one another.

This day has been a long time in the making, and I want to thank the chairman and his staff, Ranking Member Conyers, my colleague Mr. Polis, and everyone who has worked on this legislation. This is the most cosponsored bill in the entire United States House--the most popular bill--because it is a commonsense piece of legislation that affects every American and will clear up a long-time hole in the law that has allowed the government to intrude on Americans' privacy.

You have to go back to 1986 when this law was passed: Halley's Comet was passing by Earth; ``Top Gun'' was coming out as a new movie; Cabbage Patch dolls were flying off the shelves. It was a good time in America. It was also the time in which Congress last wrote the laws that updated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. At that point, there were only 10 million Americans who even had email accounts. Today, there is an estimated 232 million Americans who have email accounts. It wasn't until 6 years later that someone sent the first text message in 1992. Yet, now, we expect 1 billion text messages to be sent every single year.

The current law, which is the law that was written in 1986, allows an abuse of our constitutional rights by treating our digital information as if it is not private information--as if it can be searched and seized by the government without a warrant, without probable cause, without due process. The theory in 1986 was, if you left your email on a server, once it was left there, it was considered abandoned. It was like trash that was left out on the street corner, which didn't have an expectation of privacy anymore. We know the ways that Americans communicate today is in a way in which they expect that those transmissions are private, and they expect that the government will honor that and not search those emails or capture them for other purposes. The Fourth Amendment is being violated.

Today, we restore the Fourth Amendment by treating digital information just like paper information, and we stand strong on the notion that Americans do have an expectation of privacy in their email accounts. I would think, if I and my colleagues would each ask our constituents if they expect that their email conversations are private, they would know that they are, and they would expect that they are. As we are debating this bill, Americans are sending emails and text messages back and forth, and they expect that their government is not reviewing those.

What we do in this legislation is require a warrant. We say the government must have probable cause. They must go to a judge whether it is at the Federal level, the State level, or the local level. To review those pieces of digital information that are stored either in a drop box or on the iCloud--or just a text message that is sent back and forth--you have to have a warrant, and in a civil matter, you have to have a subpoena, and that subpoena is served on the individual.

We have documents on our desks at home. The police can't kick in your door and go read those documents unless they have a warrant backed up on probable cause. We have a digital set of documents that goes around with us wherever we go. There is a file cabinet with us. When we store things, we are doing so not because we are abandoning it. We are storing it because we are wanting to protect it, and we are wanting to ensure that we can keep it. We don't want to lose our Fourth Amendment protections because of that. This legislation would require that a warrant or a civil subpoena exist in order to read that information so that due process occurs.

This is a great unifier. Quite often on the House floor, we are divided--Republicans and Democrats--and we are not able to find resolution on some of the biggest challenges that face us; but the Fourth Amendment in the Constitution has to be preserved. I am heartened by the fact that my colleague Mr. Polis and groups on the left and groups on the right and groups in the center and that America has come together on this legislation to say we are going to fix this, and we are going to ensure that this Congress modernizes its laws and that it does so in a bipartisan fashion so that we can put this bill on the President's desk and he will sign it into law. As we continue to advance, we must remember to advance the laws that this country utilizes, and as Americans communicate in different ways, we have to modernize the way the laws treat that communication.

I am proud of the work we are doing in the House today. I thank the chairman and his team. I thank Ranking Member Conyers and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. This is a great day for America, a great day for the Constitution, and a great day for each and every one of us who uses email to correspond to know that the Fourth Amendment continues to protect us and to know that the Internet is not immune from the protections of the Constitution.

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