David Kravets reports:
A Senate committee on Thursday delayed until after the November elections whether to approve sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.
The move by the Senate Judiciary Committee to table considering the first meaningful rewrite of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act comes as law enforcement urged the committee to evaluate how crime fighting would be impacted under what would be the biggest advance to digital privacy following the act’s original adoption during the President Ronald Reagan administration.
Read more on Threat Level.
As David notes, lawmakers are likely to recess at the end of this week until after the elections. That means for the next 6 weeks or so, they won’t even try to accomplish anything – in contrast to all the time they were supposedly trying but managed to accomplish nothing anyway. I am hard pressed to think of any Congress that has been so nonfunctional and obstructive of needed progress. Shame on them all.