I.       The Problem

          The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 established workable standards for government surveillance of email and stored communications in criminal cases.  However, ECPA has been outpaced by technological developments and privacy safeguards have not yet been established for information related to new electronic services.  For example, cell phone service providers now routinely store information about the location of their customers while their cell phones are turned on, but ECPA does not specify a standard for law enforcement access to location information.  Moreover, the emergence of “cloud computing,” which enables storage on remote computers of business records and information such as personal calendars, photos, and address books, raises new privacy issues that require clear standards for custodians of this information who receive government requests for access to it.  Currently, this information is on a weaker privacy footing than the same information when it resides in the user’s computer.  A patchwork of confusing standards and conflicting judicial decisions has arisen, and it has confounded service providers and created uncertainty for law enforcement officials.

             Strong statutory standards, coupled with increased clarity, would be good for business, good for privacy, and good for law enforcement. 

I.          The Problem 

The Bush Administration’s 2007 National Information Sharing Strategy established state and local fusion centers as the federal government’s primary mechanism for collecting and disseminating domestic intelligence.  The federal government has fueled the growth of these state and local intelligence centers, and has organized them into a national network that feeds information gathered at the local level into the Director of National Intelligence’s Information Sharing Environment (ISE), where it becomes accessible to all participating law enforcement agencies as well as the larger intelligence community.  While efficiently sharing legally gathered criminal intelligence information among law enforcement agencies is a laudable goal, the federal government has encouraged these entities to broaden their collection efforts “beyond criminal intelligence, to include federal intelligence as well as public and private sector data.”  This expansion of intelligence collection at the state and local level raises profound privacy and civil liberties concerns for all Americans, particularly because these fusion centers often incorporate non-law enforcement participants, including private sector companies and the U.S. military, in their intelligence operations.  

The Problem

I.       The Problem