Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Today, the House of Representatives will again vote to approve legislation that reforms and modernizes the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or ECPA. Last year, identical legislation passed with unanimous bipartisan support by a vote of 419-0. Reforming ECPA has been a top priority for me as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I have worked with Members of Congress, advocacy groups, and law enforcement agencies for years on many complicated nuances involved in updating this law. The resulting bill is a carefully negotiated agreement to update the procedures governing government access to stored communications content and records. Thirty years ago, when personal computing was still in its infancy and few of us had ever heard of something called the world wide web, Congress enacted ECPA to establish procedures that strike a fair balance between the privacy expectations of American citizens and the legitimate needs of law enforcement agencies. In 1986, mail was sent through the U.S. Postal Service, a search engine was called a library, and clouds were found only in the sky. In 1986, computer storage was finite and expensive. It was unheard of that a commercial product would allow users to send and receive electronic communications around the globe for free and store those communications for years with a third-party provider. So much has changed in the last three decades.…”