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Electronic traffic on the information superhighway may be protected
from prying eyes under new legilsation put forward in the US last week.
Supporters of civil liberties intend to back the proposals.

Online services are a battleground between civil liberties groups and
the government, because the legal status of the services is still unclear.
This was highlighted last month, when two Californians who operated an ‘adult’
bulletin board were found guilty under local laws in Memphis, in the Bible-belt
state of Tennessee, of ‘illegally transmitting obscene material down a telephone
line’ (This Week, 13 August). It is widely believed that the bulletin operators
would not have been found guilty under the more liberal laws of California,
the state from which they were operating.

The new legislation put forward last week by two Democrats is primarily
intended to head off stricter laws being sought by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. The FBI wanted to compel companies to make it possible for
government agencies to eavesdrop on every electronic medium.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group based in Washington
which is a strong advocate of electronic civil liberties, gave the proposals
a cautious welcome, saying they believed them to be ‘substantially less
intrusive than the original FBI proposals’.

A key part of the newly proposed law deals with government access to
online services’ transaction records. These records detail how often individuals
use a service, the information they read and the contents of their e-mail.
The bill would make it harder for government agencies, such as the FBI,
to obtain this information.

The bill, which has to pass through a long legislative process before
it becomes law, seeks to clarify how much information about individual users
of electronic services can be revealed to outside agencies. Under the present
law, the FBI or other government agencies can obtain a user’s transaction
records relatively easily. The EFF’s objection is that transaction records
‘make it easy to create a detailed picture of people’s lives online’.

The new law would require the FBI to persuade a judge that there are
‘specific facts’ that justify giving the FBI access to the information it
wants. The agency would also have to show it is relevant to a current criminal
investigation. ‘That is a major new privacy protection which will benefit
all users of online communication systems,’ says Daniel Weitzner, the EFF’s
deputy policy director.