[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 85 (Wednesday, May 23, 2018)]
[House]
[Page H4593]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD GET A WARRANT TO ACCESS PRIVATE EMAIL ACCOUNTS

  (Mr. YODER asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. YODER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of my amendment to the 
National Defense Authorization Act, which would add the full text of my 
bill, H.R. 387, the Email Privacy Act.
  I want to remind my colleagues that this bill has been passed twice 
by the House, once on April 27, 2016, by a roll call of 419-0, and 
again by voice vote, unanimously, in the House on February 6, 2017.
  My legislation has a simple concept behind it: if the government 
wants access to content stored in our private email accounts, they 
should get a warrant.
  Currently, agencies can receive the stored email content of a user's 
cloud email account by sending an administrative subpoena directly to 
the service provider. This creates a double standard, where paper 
communication has greater Fourth Amendment protections than electronic 
copies.
  This standard is outdated, as the law governing this issue has not 
been updated since 1986. Now our whole lives are in the cloud and 
stored online.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the chairman and ranking member for 
accepting my amendment and Chairman Goodlatte of the Judiciary 
Committee, and I urge all those in this process, House and Senate, to 
maintain the House-passed language in the final version of the NDAA 
that we send to the President's desk.

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