Host whats next . Guest well, those hearings, i think, were very helpful at educating members of the committee, other members of congress and the general public about the importance of this issue. Interestingly, we had already scheduled the hearing on encryption before the apple fbi controversy broke out into the publics attention. And we were, i think, pleased with the presentations made by all of the witnesses at the hearing. But i think the number one thing that comes across is that encryption is a good thing and a very important thing, and we have got to find our way through this not by weakening encryption, but by continuing the effort to strengthen it. And you only need to look at the problems that weve had with foreign governments, with criminal enterprises, with just plain hackers stealing millions of documents from Government Agencies and millions of credit card records from retail establishments, from financial establishments to know that we need to be moving toward stronger
Safety and privacy, because encryption is a tool used to keep people safe, to keep information about unsafe, to keep their property safe, and therefore needs to be a critical part of how we move forward. The Judiciary Committee has long played a role in dealing with these issues from both a technology standpoint and from the Law Enforcement standpoint, and we will continue to do that. The energy and Commerce Committee also have a keen interest in this, so we will work in a collaborative effort, between the two committees and in a very bipartisan fashion to continue to develop a record on this and look for solutions that will help to make sure that Law Enforcement has ways to be able to gather the information they need to keep people safe. Part of that is going to be Law Enforcement having to either find new ways to approach gathering information, and utilizing more traditional ways of gathering information. Because i do think that over the last few decades, the reliance upon electronic
Colorado . Yes we do. With Water Quality engineers so we worked collaborative leave with the epa and others to provide those resources to have a colorado solution. Part of your job is the people of the state of colorado that the water will be saved. Does it concern you that as the chairman noted as a followup to my question in the there was zero engineers at the epa working on the mind that had the high potential to blow out . With the state of colorado handled it that way . It concerns me but that doesnt mean they were not involved in some capacity. You are in the government. It is your job to have oversight. Wouldnt have been prudent for the epa to have that oversight to make good choices before we had a catastrophe . I dont know if they rely and other resources. He would handle the very differently . Our department has its own engineers for that situation. While we were talking, if you have the unlimited budget going forward, would you be supportive of the goods and your chin legisl
The the ftc supports the objectives of ecpa reform and understands the need to update it to account for technological advances. And to protect consumers privacy. In bringing actions, we rely heavily on our ability to conduct thorough investigations. Of Companies Business practices. As a civil Law Enforcement agency, the fccs concerned that recent proposals to update ecpa could impede our ability to obtain certain information from ecpa Service Providers. In proposals, to obtain content from a Service Provider, the government could need to obtain a criminal warrant. Which is not available to the ftc. The proposals would require a warrant for all forms of content, even those in which a subscriber has no reasonable expectation to privacy. We are concerned that requiring a criminal warrant in three situations would impede effectiveness. Were talking about things like no longer running advertisements, previously sent spam, and ads on a mobile device. This content is critical to ftc investiga
Advanced and as electronic data and storage have augmented traditional means of communicating and storing information, governmental access to data is more important. Ecpa is critical to tracking down criminals in investigations into murder, kidnapping, organized crime, child exploitati exploitation, Identity Theft, terrorism, and more, but criminal investigations are only a subset of the circumstances in which ecpa applies. The statute applies when the government acts as a civil litigant. We agree that notwithstanding several updates to ecpa the statute draws some lines that do not account for the development of technology and the ways in which we use electronic and stored communications today. For example, theres no principled basis to treat email less than 180 days old different from email more than 180 days old. Theres no lesser protection to emails that have been opened to emails that remain unopened. How to account for changes the technology while maintaining privacy protections a