Electronic Communications Privacy Act

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ECPA redirects here. For the Christian publishers association, see Evangelical Christian Publishers Association

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA Pub. L. 99-508, Oct. 21, 1986, 100 Stat. 1848, #redirect ) was enacted by the U.S. Congress to extend government restrictions on wire taps from telephone calls to include transmissions of electronic data by computer. Specifically, ECPA was an amendment to Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (the Wire Tap Statute), which was primarily designed to prevent unauthorized government access to private electronic communications. Later, ECPA was amended, and weakened to some extent, by some provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. In addition, Section 2709 of the Act, which allowed the FBI to issue National Security Letters to ISPs ordering them to disclose records about their customers, was ruled unconstitutional under the First (and possibly Fourth) Amendments in ACLU v. Ashcroft (2004). It is thought that this could be applied to other uses of NSLs.

Title I of ECPA protects electronic communications while in transit. Title II of the ECPA, the Stored Communications Act (SCA) protects messages stored on computers, but its protections are weaker than the ECPA's. Several court cases raised the question of whether e-mail messages are protected under ECPA while they were in temporary storage enroute to their final destination. In United States v. Councilman, a U.S. district court and a three judge appeals panel ruled they were not, but in 2005, the full United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that they were. Privacy advocates were relieved, though the ruling might still be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. They had argued in Amicus curiae briefs that if the ECPA did not protect e-mail in temporary storage, its added protections were meaningless as virtually all electronic mail is stored temproarily in transit at least once and that Congress would have known this in 1986 when the law was passed. (see e.g. RFC 822).

From a rights perspective, the ECPA only protects individuals' communications against government surveillance conducted without a court order, from third parties with no legitimate access to the messages, and from the carriers of the messages, such as Internet service providers. However it appears to provide little privacy protection to employees with respect to their communications as conducted on the equipment owned by their employer.

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