My first job in Washington was working as a policy analyst for a trade association of IT companies, so believe me when I say there’s nothing — absolutely nothing — that will make an average political activist’s eyes glaze over more quickly than talking about technology policy. This is especially true on the right.

As such, many kudos now come due to the American Civil Liberties Union, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage Action for America (the 501(c)(4) sister organization to the Heritage Foundation think tank), and the Center for Democracy and Technology for the video they released as part of their Digital 4th campaign, a grassroots lobbying effort urging Congress to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA reform”). As you can see in the video, which offers a refreshingly humorous perspective on a pretty wonky subject, technology has evolved beyond privacy statutes, and certain forms of communication many of us use every single day aren’t protected by law. That should change, so I urge you to share their video (or this blog post!), or otherwise help get the word out.

The broader critique I would make of the relationship between Washington and technology service providers is that it is nowhere more evident than in the information technology sector of the economy that Washington has little to no business interfering with private actors. As I pointed out in a recent entry here on the botched launch of Healthcare.gov, the pace of technological innovation is astronomically faster than the pace of legislation and/or regulation. Innovation, by nature, is proactive; legislation and regulation are, by nature, reactive. Washington’s true believers in government benevolence, and their subsequent policy activism, have forced industry players to develop influence hubs in Washington, thus exacerbating an existing problem of cronyism. To read more on this dynamic, see Wikipedia’s entry for the Prisoner’s dilemma.

But my point is that ECPA reform, while important, is a symptom of a broader problem. Needing statutory privacy protections above and beyond what the Fourth Amendment does to constrain what government can do is the real problem. But this is how our legal system works, so for now, we have to settle with incremental changes where and when they’re needed. Please visit Digital 4th to learn more about ECPA, and why it needs reforming.