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ARL Applauds Judiciary Committee Action to Reform Privacy Laws

patrick-leahy
Senator Patrick Leahy
image © World Bank

On Thursday, April 25, the US Senate Judiciary Committee took another crucial step toward fixing outdated privacy laws by endorsing a bill proposed by Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) that includes vital reforms to give appropriate privacy protection to e-mail and cloud storage. The committee passed a similar bill in November 2012, but the legislative session ended before the measure could reach the full Senate. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) applauds Chairman Leahy and all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for their strong, bipartisan support for reasonable privacy protections online.

For more information about the committee action and the bill, which would update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), see “Updating an E-Mail Law from the Last Century” in the New York Times (April 24, 2013).


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

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