It’s time to protect data in the cloud
January 27, 2014
Grazed from DailyCaller. Author: Steven Titch.
Tuesday’s State of the Union address affords President Barack Obama another opportunity to address the government’s massive overreach in collecting data about ordinary Americans in the name of protecting us. Although Obama, a constitutional scholar, spoke at length in a January 17th address to the nation about balancing individual privacy and national security, even conceding that there is a "bias" within government to amass as much information as it can, he offered no guidance or framework to Congress as to how existing law can be strengthened to protect Americans from wholesale government intrusion into their online lives.
Fortunately, bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill have been gaining ground. And while the scope of NSA and other government abuses defy a single solution, strengthening existing laws, particularly the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, is a great place to start. Even before news of the NSA’s surveillance programs broke last June, Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, had co-sponsored revisions of ECPA to extend Fourth Amendment protections to private data stored on servers on the Internet, or as it’s called current nomenclature, the "cloud."…
ECPA sets out rules for law enforcement agencies that want to tap phone lines. When it was enacted nearly 30 years ago, there was no concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing makes it possible for users to, for example, access playlists and movies from multiple devices, because that content is stored on servers in data centers that could be anywhere in the world…
Read more from the source @ http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/27/its-time-to-protect-data-in-the-cloud/