Comment by metamemetics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metamemetics | Hacker News Reader

If you are an American HNer, please tell your congressmen\women to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act if you have not already. Your private information should not be excluded from 4th ammendment protection just because it's on the Internet.

If you don't know how to contact your representative\senator, the ACLU makes it extremely easy and can locate them for you and send a letter on your behalf via this online form:

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=U...

From the website:

"Today, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which should safeguard electronic communications records (like your email or chat logs) and the information you share with companies, is in serious need of an update.

The government should have to go to a judge and get a warrant that says it has probable cause to believe you've committed a crime before it can read your email, browse through your social networking account, or track your location."

If you're a US Citizen you don't have to worry about your information, since the NSA is forbidden by law from collecting information about US Citizens.

* I learned this while playing Splinter Cell.

The phone companies are also forbidden by law from collecting this data. That didn't stop them from doing so a few years back, and the Congress helpfully gave them immunity after the fact.

Legislative guarantees of privacy and other freedoms are no guarantees at all.

cough

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

cough

It's also important to update the ECPA because it would apply to ANY federal agency. There were a series of links to HN where cell phone companies built backend web apps for law enforcement officials to track people's phone location without warrents as long as they told the phone company it was for an emergency. In other words, it was being used by police to track the location of labor union protestors in one instance, the article confirmed.

The law needs to be updated due to a multitude of issues, such as Amazon.com being requested by the Department of Revenue to give them access to customer purchase history. Even on a basic level, is this something that programmers or web developers on HN want to be developing or maintaining?

I do not believe that anymore.

If you are a US Citizen within the US talking to another US citizen within the US, this is true.

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