eNewsletters

Dear Friend,

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee passed a long-awaited update to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a great step forward for Americans’ civil liberties and the competitiveness of the U.S. technology sector.

The Email Privacy Act (H.R. 699) – a bipartisan bill with more than 300 House cosponsors – would finally require law enforcement to obtain a warrant to access emails older than 180 days. I’m pleased I was able to help pass H.R. 699 through committee, bringing us one step closer to eliminating the artificial distinction between a piece of paper in a filing cabinet and an email on a server.

Updating ECPA has been one of my top priorities since being elected to Congress because it’s unacceptable that our current email privacy law dates to the 1980s. I worked on email in those days, and it was nothing like today with cloud computing and smartphones putting our lives online to a degree lawmakers never contemplated back then.

Moving forward, I’ll continue working with my colleagues to get it signed into law, and address other critical ECPA-related issues like protecting our geolocation informationand data stored overseas.

As always, my office is here to serve you. If you have questions or comments about the topics that matter most to you, I encourage you to contact me through my website. You may also keep up-to-date on what I’m doing by following me on social media. If you need assistance dealing with a federal agency, such as the IRS or the VA, please do not hesitate to contact my Bothell office at (425) 485-0085.

Sincerely,

Suzan