Political Quotes

“the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was first enacted in 1986. I would ask my colleagues, what were you doing in 1986? Mr. President, 1986 was a long time ago. In 1986 I was in the ninth grade. This was an age when not everyone had a personal computer. My family didn't have a computer. Most of the people I knew who had a computer had something like the Commodore VIC-20, which was a very small computer with very little processing power compared to what we have today. But this law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act--or ECPA, as it is sometimes known--was and still is an important law with an increasingly important objective; that is, to ensure that government agencies respect the Fourth Amendment in accessing an individual's electronic communications. In the nearly three decades since ECPA became law, technology has advanced rapidly, dramatically, far beyond the capacity of this particular law, ECPA, to keep up. The prevalence of email and the low cost of electronic data storage have made what were once robust protections vastly insufficient to ensure that citizens' rights are protected with respect to their electronic communications, such as email. There is no reason we should still be operating under a law written in the analog age when we are living in a digital world.…”