Lewis
Member
Over the weekend, we reported that the government had ordered Twitter to turn over private information about users associated with WikiLeaks.
The order was fairly routine, and Twitter and other Internet companies have so far refused to talk more about it. But, as we wrote in Monday’s paper, the high-profile nature of the court order brought to light an issue that cyberlaw experts have been discussing for years: the ways in which the law lags fast-changing technology.
The question boils down to this: Should personal information that people store online, like e-mail messages, photos and location updates, be treated the same as telephone calls or paper documents stored in a person’s home?
Right now, they often aren’t, in part because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which governs surveillance of what people do online, was written in 1986 — well before Twitter direct messages, Facebook status updates or Foursquare check-ins.
And Web users generally do not understand when and how law enforcement can get access to their information, said Ryan Calo, director of the consumer privacy project at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
“People have no idea that with a relatively small amount of process, people can get all this information that they’ve been storing for more than 180 days,” Mr. Calo said. “If they were to go and look at a privacy policy, it would say, ‘We comply with lawful requests for your information,’ but you don’t know what that means.”
In March, a group of Internet companies and advocacy groups like Google, Amazon.com and the Center for Democracy andTechnology started a group called Digital Due Process to try to update the 1986 law.
But the group faces stiff resistance, particularly from law enforcement in the wake of the attacks of 9/11.
“When you have folks like the people holding this information and people concerned about privacy and autonomy all saying this needs to change, and it doesn’t change for 20 or 30 years, someone’s pushing back, and that someone is law enforcement,” Mr. Calo said.
So far, updates to the law have been piecemeal. For example, last month, the United States Court of Appeal for the Sixth Circuit, considering a fraud case, ruled that law enforcement cannot access e-mail messages stored online without a warrant because they are protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches.
Should E-Mail and Letters Have Equal Legal Protection? - NYTimes.com
The order was fairly routine, and Twitter and other Internet companies have so far refused to talk more about it. But, as we wrote in Monday’s paper, the high-profile nature of the court order brought to light an issue that cyberlaw experts have been discussing for years: the ways in which the law lags fast-changing technology.
The question boils down to this: Should personal information that people store online, like e-mail messages, photos and location updates, be treated the same as telephone calls or paper documents stored in a person’s home?
Right now, they often aren’t, in part because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which governs surveillance of what people do online, was written in 1986 — well before Twitter direct messages, Facebook status updates or Foursquare check-ins.
And Web users generally do not understand when and how law enforcement can get access to their information, said Ryan Calo, director of the consumer privacy project at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
“People have no idea that with a relatively small amount of process, people can get all this information that they’ve been storing for more than 180 days,” Mr. Calo said. “If they were to go and look at a privacy policy, it would say, ‘We comply with lawful requests for your information,’ but you don’t know what that means.”
In March, a group of Internet companies and advocacy groups like Google, Amazon.com and the Center for Democracy andTechnology started a group called Digital Due Process to try to update the 1986 law.
But the group faces stiff resistance, particularly from law enforcement in the wake of the attacks of 9/11.
“When you have folks like the people holding this information and people concerned about privacy and autonomy all saying this needs to change, and it doesn’t change for 20 or 30 years, someone’s pushing back, and that someone is law enforcement,” Mr. Calo said.
So far, updates to the law have been piecemeal. For example, last month, the United States Court of Appeal for the Sixth Circuit, considering a fraud case, ruled that law enforcement cannot access e-mail messages stored online without a warrant because they are protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches.
Should E-Mail and Letters Have Equal Legal Protection? - NYTimes.com
