On the recordApril 27, 2016
I want to applaud my colleagues from Kansas and from Colorado for their work in crafting this bill. I think it is awfully important. I think it is what people expect. When they think about government, they want a government that works for them. Part of having a government that works for them means actually updating laws as technology has changed. So I think that, at the core, this is about keeping current with the rate of change in the world of technology. It is amazing to me--I pulled the numbers--that there are roughly 205 billion emails sent every day around the world. If you presuppose that America's economy is about 20 percent of that world pie, that means around 40 million or more emails are sent across this country every single day. In contrast is the U.S. Postal Service. There are about 600 million letters that go across this country every day, which is to say, mathematically, you are saying that about 1.5 percent of the communication flow, either via mail or electronic means, are sent by the Postal Service. The other, in essence, 99 percent of the communications are sent via email, which is to say we have a real problem with a law that was created in the 1980s that doesn't take into account the way the world has changed. So I applaud the crafters of this bill for what they have done in recognizing technology change. I applaud them for the way that they stayed true to the Fourth Amendment.…
