Email Privacy Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Thank you for this opportunity to have this very important debate on a critical piece of legislation that has been a long time in the coming. I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Goodlatte, and Ranking Member Conyers for their work and leadership in shepherding this bill through the process and getting us to this moment on the floor today. I thank my colleague, Mr. Polis, for cosponsoring this legislation and working so tirelessly over the past few years.

I think we originally introduced this bill back in 2013, and it takes a while sometimes for a good idea to reach this point in Congress, Mr.

Speaker, and this is an idea whose time has come. So I rise today to support these long overdue, bipartisan ideas in this legislation that will bring our digital privacy laws into the 21st century.

Mr. Speaker, the year was 1986. We can all try to think back where we were in 1986. I am sure Kentucky had a good basketball team back then.

I know Kansas did. I was 10 years old, hoping to get a new Nintendo game console for Christmas so I could play Super Mario Brothers. You could buy a ticket to see Top Gun for $2.75. In the tech world, 1986 marked the debut of the first laptop computer. It was 12 pounds. A mobile phone was the size of a small pet.

Mr. Speaker, it was also the year in which Congress passed the Electronic Communication Privacy Act. Now, this law, at the time, there were only 10 million email users worldwide. Most of us probably didn't have email at that time. Most Americans didn't for sure. Now, today, 232 million Americans send an email at least once per month. The first text message wouldn't be sent for another 6 years, and now Americans send more than a billion texts each year.

Mr. Speaker, the times and technologies have changed, but the laws have not kept pace. Federal laws regarding how we treat and protect the privacy of digital communications have been unchanged since 1986 and, because of it, our digital content is not afforded the same Fourth Amendment protections as our paper documents on our desks in our home.

Now, the Fourth Amendment protects the ``right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.'' Yet when it comes to what is on Americans' cell phones, their home computers, what might be in the cloud, or on their business computer, whatever it is, our laws allow Federal agencies like the IRS, the SEC, or law enforcement to kick down their virtual doors and search an innocent American's private communications and data storage without a warrant, without probable cause or any type of due process.

Now, many Americans take great precautions to protect and store their digital communications on services like Dropbox, for example, or an iCloud. Yet our Federal laws perversely treat that data storage as if somehow that data has been abandoned by its owner and, therefore, that data loses its constitutional protection.
Well, in 1986, Mr. Speaker, lawmakers believed within reason that individuals and families wouldn't store mass amounts of data online.

They wouldn't leave their Gmail stored online. They might have their own servers, or they would delete the emails or delete the data.

Therefore, if an individual actually left information on a third- party storage, it was akin to that person leaving their documents in a garbage can at the end of their driveway, therefore, voiding its Fourth Amendment protections. Thus, that individual had no reasonable expectation of privacy in regards to that email under the Fourth Amendment.

As we all know, virtually everyone now stores millions of emails and tons of gigabytes of data and other personal items on third-party servers. Those emails contain pictures and videos of our kids, our business transactions, our most sensitive information that the government shouldn't have access to without a warrant, without due process as required by the Constitution of the United States.

Establishing these privacy protections are critical for both ensuring that American's rights are protected, but also, Mr. Speaker, ensuring that companies that do business in America know that they can ensure their customers that if they store with them, they can protect it; that that information won't be intruded upon or searched and seized without due process of law, without their permission, without the government proving that they have a need for that information and protecting individuals' rights.

We ensure that cloud computer services are covered by the same warranty for content requirements and that all data is treated as if it is paper documents given our law modernization that is desperately needed.
In addition to updating our constitutional rights, these privacy protections do create business certainty, making sure consumers will be happy to continue to use cloud storage services.

Mr. Speaker, fundamentally, these changes in my bill codify the Sixth Circuit's decision in U.S. v. Warshak, which held that email content is protected by the Fourth Amendment. A decision which, while important, needs to be enshrined in law as it only currently applies in the Sixth Circuit. It must be applied nationwide.

Mr. Speaker, today we can cast a unifying vote in these divided times. We so desperately want to find points of bipartisanship and collegiality and to tell the American people that this Congress, this government is doing great things to help protect Americans' rights and to help modernize our laws in a way that is consistent with how we communicate today.

I thank my colleagues on the left side of the aisle for their strong work and strong support. This is a unifying bill. It passed the House last year 419-0. So it is the type of thing that is great policy coming out of the Judiciary Committee. I look forward to seeing it pass again on the floor later today.

So, Mr. Speaker, we can send a unifying vote and a unifying message to the American people today. We can dispel the myth that Congress doesn't work together, and we can send a strong message to the American people that their privacy matters.

I urge passage.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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