Question

e ECPA extends the protections (from governmental monitoring) of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act to:

• E-mail, cellular telephones, radio paging devices, private communication carriers, and computer transmissions.
• Both storage and transmission of digitized textual information (email) and voice mail.
• Customer records of electronic service providers.

This act is now 33 years old. Is it still adequate to protect electronic communications from unwarranted snooping? What additional protections are required as we approach 2020 given the advances we have seen in technology?

Answer 1

Electronic Communications Privacy Act or the amendments make on the ECPA Act aren't adequate to hold the power of today's technology and Data driven society.

Some Scenarios are -

1) The Most common flaw in ECPA is that it gives protection to things which were stored in permanent storage only for a 180 days that is 6 months, and today no one can afford to let there data which is older then 6 month be open to the government for scrutiny, the reason being today we have way too many things Available on the Electronic media then which was 35 years back so we can't see how things get irrelevant today which was build and kept in storage just 6 months back.

Second the new form of media, like storing confidential records, financial status report and more like keys and passcode for tons of wallets all these things didn't existed few years back so it's not fair to use a 35 year old law to protect then.

Coming to how we can make changes do we need now, so this is based on the opinion of people but I'll suggest to put constraints on the corporates on how much information they can ask from the users knowing or unknowingly for Providing what they say "Better services". Currently in the AI and Big Data Market the companies knows now only the data we store but with technology like GPS and Analytics tools they can literally map the life of people in numbers with there permission for " improving there services" which isn't fair.

Now only the government need to keep the public informed about these possible scenarios but also that these companies should now be allowed to on the first hand as these can be used in tons of bad ways, most importantly manipulation of the thinking and opinions for favouring a particular.

We do need to add options for the government for having rights to tap the digital data with permission else we will have a lot of scenario we are facing today we're we aren't able to prove things because we don't have enough evidence to claim to look at the email which actually has the evidence.

It's a complex problem for sure but certainly we need to do something, and not rely on a three decade old system.

Hope it helps