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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time believing that the House would make this such an early part of its business without there being some exigent need. I wonder what scandal they are trying to forestall? I'm 100% serious. Every move they've made so far has been from a playbook. I doubt this one was done for the people.

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This bill was originally introduced in 2013 and unanimously passed the House last year, it isn't new. It got blocked and then weakened in the Senate last year, so they're just trying again. In general I think the House is less theatrical and scripted than the Senate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_Privacy_Act

Thanks for the link.

Interestingly in 2015, AG to be Sessions introduced an amendment that "would have exempted federal agents from the requirement to secure a warrant if the government asserts that an emergency situation exists."

The bill was then withdrawn from consideration.

Is there something similar attached to the current version?

No, this bill is essentially identical to the version that was sent to the Senate last year. You can compare them here:

https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/hr699/BILLS-114hr699rds.p...

https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr387/BILLS-115hr387ih.pd...

The only differences I saw are that it's now a BILL instead of an ACT, and they added the word "and" in one spot.

As far as I can tell the amendments were not actually voted on last year; the bill was preemptively withdrawn because the sponsors thought passing a bill with the amendments would be worse than not passing it at all.

Yes, we can only hope the Senate doesn't poison the bill again. The EFF supports the bill as passed by the House.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/fight-over-email-priva...

> I have a hard time believing that the House would make this such an early part of its business without there being some exigent need

I'd like to picture it as if someone suddenly realized that giving the government too much power is a bad idea in case the wrong kind of person (Trump) gets put in charge. I like that thought.

You're probably right though...

I had a similar thought, although my reaction was more along the lines of trying to soften the blow of some draconian backdoor policy.

That is, "well, what are you worried about with crippled encryption? We made it harder to get permission to access your email, so now it's ok if we require a backdoor for the government on all encryption."

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