Just stumbled upon this at Daily Kos. State Senator Karen Spilka, who’s in the race to succeed Ed Markey in Congress should he win next Tuesday, has introduced legislation to protect citizens’ data:
Long before Massachusetts was a high-tech leader, we led the nation in developing laws to safeguard our liberty. Today, we must lead again — to make sure privacy protections keep pace with technology and renew our freedoms in the digital age.
Just recently, the American people have been given a wake-up call that our privacy is not as secure as we think it is.
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Most Americans are shocked to learn that, because of significant gaps in the law, law enforcement can quietly look at all of our phone records, our old emails, and the documents we store online — without ever getting a search warrant or even notifying the person whose records have been inspected.
This is chilling. That’s why, in the Massachusetts Senate, I have filed legislation known as the Electronic Privacy Act to protect our privacy and guarantee that our system of checks and balances applies to our digital lives.
As Senator Spilka explains:
The Electronic Privacy Act would make our statutes say what most of us assumed they said already — that our phone and Internet records are private, unless police have probable cause to believe we’re involved in criminal activity or the information is needed to protect lives in an emergency. This simple standard has worked for search warrants for hundreds of years. Now we must update it to apply in an era when many of our “papers and effects,” which the constitution aims to protect, are kept at our service providers’ homes instead of our own.
Of course, even if if the proposal makes it through our legislature and is signed into law, there are limits to how much a state law can protect against intrusion by federal “national security” officials. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Should we infer, or has she said, that she would in fact introduce similar legislation should she be elected to Congress?
she’d try to introduce something in Congress. She ended the post with this: