Schneier on Security

"The Next Generation Communications Privacy Act"

Orin Kerr envisions what the ECPA should look like today:

Abstract: In 1986, Congress enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to regulate government access to Internet communications and records. ECPA is widely seen as outdated, and ECPA reform is now on the Congressional agenda. At the same time, existing reform proposals retain the structure of the 1986 Act and merely tinker with a few small aspects of the statute. This Article offers a thought experiment about what might happen if Congress repealed ECPA and enacted a new privacy statute to replace it.

The new statute would look quite different from ECPA because overlooked changes in Internet technology have dramatically altered the assumptions on which the 1986 Act was based. ECPA was designed for a network world with high storage costs and only local network access. Its design reflects the privacy threats of such a network, including high privacy protection for real-time wiretapping, little protection for non-content records, and no attention to particularity or jurisdiction. Today’s Internet reverses all of these assumptions. Storage costs have plummeted, leading to a reality of almost total storage. Even United States-based services now serve a predominantly foreign customer base. A new statute would need to account for these changes.

The Article contends that a next generation privacy act should contain four features. First, it should impose the same requirement on access to all contents. Second, it should impose particularity requirements on the scope of disclosed metadata. Third, it should impose minimization rules on all accessed content. And fourth, it should impose a two-part territoriality regime with a mandatory rule structure for United States-based users and a permissive regime for users located abroad.

Tags: academic papers, history of security, Internet, national security policy, privacy

Posted on August 26, 2013 at 7:02 AM • 14 Comments