A new privacy law to replace the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act is necessaryrnand could protect Americans’ access to their online content with a uniform standard for contentrnaccess, said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and cybercrime law expert.rnIn a speech Monday at the Library of Congress (http://bit.ly/1bmruIx), Kerr discussed his recentrnarticle, “The Next Generation Privacy Act,” (http://1.usa.gov/14YH4oP) which details the historyrnof ECPA, how, in his view, it has become irrelevant, and how to craft the law’s replacementrnlegislation. “The incredible growth of the Internet and its rapid transformation from a toy to an essentialrnpart of daily life has made the accuracy and timeliness of the electronic privacy laws morernimportant than ever before,” Kerr wrote. A new law should focus on “particularity and minimization,”rnhe wrote, “and deal explicitly with the problem of extraterritoriality.” A consistent legal standardrnfor content access would also eliminate the varying standards for government access to informationrndepending on how old the data is, he said. From 1998 to 2001, Kerr worked for the JusticernDepartment’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, where he wrote the agency’s manualrnon computer crimes (http://bit.ly/GztcbG).
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