Experts To Congress: US Law Should Be Changed to Require Permanent Storage of Billions Of Private Text Messages, Emails

In a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee Tuesday, a panel of technology law experts called on Congress to pass legislation mandating the long-term retention of every American’s text messages and emails in case of a future criminal investigation.

“Billions of texts are sent every day, and some surely contain key evidence about criminal activity,” said Richard Littlehale of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and a member of the panel in his written statement. “Text messaging often plays a big role in investigations related to domestic violence, stalking, menacing, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking.”

The hearing was held to discuss potential new provisions of the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986. The panel’s suggestions included longer retention times of interpersonal electronic messages as well as the creation of and expedited federal access to these databases. Not everyone was pleased with the panel’s recommendations.

“From a consumer privacy perspective, from a network security perspective, let alone the cost perspective of storing the tens of billions of messages that are sent around the various networks … it’s really an unwieldy and unworkable idea,” said a telecommunication executive, providing background information on the proposal.

The executive cited recent worldwide hackings as an example of potential risk to public safety and security when it comes to maintaining such a database.

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