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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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The bill was then withdrawn from consideration.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As far as I can tell the amendments were not actually voted on last year; the bill was preemptively withdrawn because the sponsors thought passing a bill with the amendments would be worse than not passing it at all.

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