Senate Judiciary Delays Markup of ECPA Modernization Bill Until Next Week

Markup of Senate legislation aimed at updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was delayed until next week, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said at Thursday's executive business meeting. The committee held a September hearing (see 1509160055) on the ECPA Amendments Act (S-356), and hasn't acted on it since. Meanwhile, the House passed its version 419-0 in April (see 1604270067), with some saying the pressure is on the Senate now to act quickly. "There's some feeling -- I don't know if it's members or some outside groups -- that since this bill passed the House ... that we should accept it," Grassley said at the meeting. "My judgment is that the Senate ought to do its due diligence on it and so that'll come out next week depending on what sort of bipartisan agreement we can get if there's going to be any changes. And I'm not anticipating any because I just don't know at this point." Ranking member Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., who introduced the bill along with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said the Senate legislation does have wide backing from the American Civil Liberties Union, Heritage Action for America, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It's time we updated our laws to reflect the fact that the papers -- protected expressly, explicitly under the Fourth Amendment -- have moved over the last couple of centuries," said Lee during the meeting. "They've moved from the desk drawer and the file cabinet drawer to the server in the cloud. But that should not, in my opinion, lessen the privacy protections to which those personal documents are entitled and to which their owners are entitled." The House bill (HR-699) went through some significant changes -- "painful for many" -- but it resulted in broad-based, bipartisan consensus, Lee said, saying he hopes the Senate committee could achieve the same.