The NSA claims it doesn't need a warrant to dig through your emails, because terrorism, but you may not know that the law already allows other law-enforcement agencies to dig through your emails without a warrant. How? Well, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed in 1986, and it considered any email left on a server for more than six months to be "abandoned," and if the user's "abandoned" it, the state doesn't need a warrant to look at it. Remember how much email you were using in 1986? Exactly. And how many of your emails are still out there on your server now, even after you've downloaded them to your computer? Quite possibly all of them -- and that's before we got to whatever, say, Amazon or iTunes has stored for you in "the cloud." But H.R. 1852, the Email Privacy Act, would mandate that government agencies get a warrant before looking at emails (and other documents) stored in the cloud. H.R. 1852 has over 180 co-sponsors, some of them Republicans; if it gets to 218, John Boehner will have little excuse not to hold a vote on it, spout though he will that it's a "job-killing" bill, or that it's Communism, or Benghazi, or something. Both Demand Progress and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1852.
Speaking of things the House would like to do, here comes a yet-to-be-numbered bill, the SCRUB Act, which stands for "Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act." But the bill would establish a burdensome nine-member commission to review and override regulations solely because of their "cost" to the "economy." Will such a commission count, say, the cost of treating illnesses, and the cost of the resulting lost work days, that laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act save our economy? Of course not -- they're mainly concerned about the "cost" to some coal CEO's bank account, since to them CEOs are The Economy. And if Americans don't like the idea of some trade-pact "investor-state tribunal" overriding our nation's laws every time some big corporation wants to dump some Frankenslurry into our water, why would we like giving a similar power to some commission? We've already got "commissions" for that; they're called the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Executive branch agencies the House and Senate establish through law. I think this bill warrants a phone call in opposition to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.
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