Following the Senate Judiciary Committee passage of S. 607, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) Amendments of 2013, SIIA urged members of Congress to move swiftly to approve the important legislation. I issued the following statement:
ECPA is outdated and badly in need of reform, and today’s action gets us one important step closer to that goal. The technological advances in communications and computing since the bill’s original passage in 1986 have been nothing short of revolutionary. As such, the legal framework provided by this statue leaves both providers and users of remote computing with a complex, baffling, and outdated set of rules.
The reforms approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee will end the current law’s double-standard that provides for a lower level of privacy for communications stored remotely, or ‘in the cloud.’ The legislation will even the playing field for law enforcement access to electronic content, setting a warrant as the consistent standard, regardless of how or where the content is stored. We urge the full Senate to now move this bill forward, so that Americans can be assured that information stored in the cloud gets the same protection as the information stored in their homes.
Ken Wasch is President of SIIA. Follow the SIIA Software team on twitter at @SIIASoftware.
Denys Emmert is the Public Policy intern at SIIA. He has a degree in marketing and political science from Florida State University.
Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team at
Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at
David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy. Follow the SIIA public policy team on Twitter at