Barack Obama Could Actually Reform Your Email Privacy On Friday, Buuuuut He Might Not

Barack Obama is supposed to make a big speech on Friday, outlining his plans to reign in the National Security Administration and preserve Americans security, years and years after the NSA expanded data collection and privacy intrusion beyond even Bush Administration levels, even as Barack Obama himself publicly decried the surveillance state that had developed in the wake of 9/11.

Anyway, even though most people are highly suspicious of the administration’s commitment to pulling back on their spying habits (after all, they didn’t even abandon a massive cell phone metadata mining program when it was found to be completely useless in detecting and preventing acts of terrorism), there is at least one thing the Obama Administration could do right away to help protect Americans’ privacy. And it’s bipartisan. And common sense. And the panel that reviewed the NSA’s systems recommended it. Which means it probably won’t make it into the final strategy. But it’s worth a shot, right?…

Basically, the Federal laws regarding when an agency needs a warrant to get hold of a person’s electronic communications, like their email, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, hasn’t been updated since 1986 (twenty seven years ago), before any of us started using email, which is probably par for the course for the government, but is a real problem when you consider that Americans spend far more time communicating via the Internet than anywhere else (we send almost 145 billion emails every day). But your emails don’t (currently) even have the same protections as your snail mail.

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