The U.S. House of Representatives has again passed H.R. 387, the Email Privacy Act -- and has, again, passed the bill unanimously. H.R. 387 would, as you no doubt recall, require our government to get a warrant before searching any emails you've left on your email provider's server. Current communication law -- and "current," in this case, means "30 years old" -- regards emails left on your server as "abandoned," and thus doesn't require our government to get a warrant before Hoovering them up, but this is the cloud computing era, where documents you clearly use all the time get left on servers. Last time the Email Privacy Act sailed through the House, a few Senators tried to attach poison pills to it (like the amendment offered by Jeff Sessions that would have allowed our government to shout emergency! as a way around getting a warrant, a power that could never, ever be abused!). So you may want to call your Senators about passing the Email Privacy Act as is, without poison pills. They'll never see it coming.
Meanwhile, both CREDO and Amnesty International help you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that would end President Trump's Muslim ban. A federal judge (not a "so-called" federal judge, Mr. Trump) issued a stay against the Trump order last week, but this may wind up at the U.S. Supreme Court, and you never know which hat John Roberts will have on (either the "obsessive literalist" hat or the "right-wing judicial activist" hat; the first is, obviously, more palatable) when the Court hears a case. So Congress can, in the meantime, act against a stupid and racist ban that clearly targets immigrants of a certain religion (hey, Rudy Giuliani said so! In public!) and clearly targets refugees, i.e., the class of people least likely to inflict terrorism on others precisely because they've had terrorism inflicted upon them. (No, terrorists more frequently come from classes of people who don't suffer from terrorism, but who witness others folks' suffering.) Congress may well be afraid of Trumpeteers throwing bricks through their windows if they oppose him, but no one said the work of civilization was easy.
Finally, Congress has lately moved to block the Obama Administration's methane emissions standards -- because what's more freedom-loving than natural gas corporations wasting methane gas into the atmosphere, so that it can not only make climate change worse, but be completely unavailable to consumers as an energy source? -- and thus some in Pennsylvania's state legislature have introduced SB 175, which would prevent the state Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any methane emissions standards that are stronger than the federal one! Which, as we've just described, is about to become nonexistent! What clever folks these Pennsylvania state legislators are! And again, it's not just the pollution that bothers me about this, it's the waste -- Pennsylvania gas drillers waste enough methane to heat over 100,000 homes for an entire year. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your state legislators to reject SB 175, and take matters like clean air and climate change a bit more seriously than they take their big donors' pocketbooks.
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