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Government Surveillance

ECPA Reform Comments before US House Judiciary Committee

Chris Calabrese, CDT’s Vice President of Policy, will testify before the US House Judiciary Committee on H.R. 699, the “Email Privacy Act.”

His testimony is available here.

Every day, whistleblowers reach out to journalists (and members of this Committee), advocates plan protests against government injustice and ordinary citizens complain about their government. All of these activities are crucial to our democracy. They also all rely on our long-held constitutional guarantee of private communications, secure from arbitrary access by the government. This is true whether the communication happens in the form of a letter, a phone call or, increasingly, an email, text message or over a social network. But as our technology has changed, the legal underpinnings that protect our privacy have not always kept up.