Acceso usuarios
Lauren Kirchner
In 1986, the year Pres Reagan signed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), most reporters did their work with a pencil and pad, a rotary phone, and a pair of sensible shoes. Email was virtually unheard of, and just about the only person to regularly use a mobile phone was Gordon Gekko. Twenty-seven years later, emails travel at astonishing speed and can remain forever on remote servers. And in so many ways, journalists and their news organizations increasingly depend on the cloud. Yet ECPA, which governs how easily law enforcement and government agencies can access "electronic communications" in the course of investigating crimes hasn't changed to reflect the new digital reality. Here, Kirchner explains why ECPA is so problematic and wonders whether it can be modernized.
