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We Need to Cut a New Deal on Communications Privacy

By David R. Johnson
February 28, 2014

It is (high) time to rewrite and modernize the law that regulates access to our private communications and to the detailed information those communications automatically create.

No, I'm not talking about the statutes relating to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or the National Security Agency's collection of metadata. We do need to constrain the growth of a surveillance state, even if some intelligence activities can be justified. But ordinary government information collection and eavesdropping, in the course of normal law enforcement activities, are just as badly in need of reform.

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