Childs Internet and Electronic Communication Acts
Technology and new forms of communication has continued to evolve and improved our everyday lives. With the advancement of new technology, new laws are evolved to protect those who use it and prosecute to those who abuse it. In this paper, I will be discussing the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) as well as the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA). I will state the legal facts of these two topics as well as discuss the ethics that surround the legal issues and how those issues affect us today.
The Facts
The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) of 2000 is an Act that is applied to public schools or libraries to receive federal funding while in compliance with technological safety measures. Over the past years, more than $190 million has disbursed to more than 5,000 public libraries through federal programs called E-rate where discounts are given on telecommunications and Internet access under certain conditions (CIPA, 2001). Such conditions that US Supreme Court has argued and agreed that require public libraries and schools must enforce certain software control to protect minors from harmful materials and block pornographic Websites (Mark, 2002).
Ethical Issues However, blocking Websites containing protected speech can be an ethical issue in violating our Constitutional right of our First Amendment, our Freedom of Speech. Also filtering or blocking does not always protect children from harmful material. Such parental control software programs often mislead parents to believe that their children are protected from harmful websites, when in fact, that they are not. “Recent studies have shown that filters fail to block as many as one in five objectionable Web sites” (Mark, 2002 Pg. 23).
The Facts
The Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) specifies which, electronic communications are private and prohibits the unauthorized access to and disclosure for private communication. The law was enacted in 1986 that included various forms of wire and electronic communications. For instance any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, and data. The ECPA is based on the privacy rights derived from the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures found in the Fourth Amendment (Jan, H. & John L, 2010).
In 2001, Congress provided tools that were required to block the terrorism Act and altered the ECPA to make the Act more effective to fight Terrorism. This insured Congress that the terrorist activities would be added to the list of crimes that would justify a wiretap. It also insures, if a person intercepts a message that appears to threaten a murder or terrorist attack that information can be legally given to the police. This allows law enforcement to record any e-mail addresses from messages coming in to or going out from tapped email accounts. Law enforcement can also see or overhear any information or communication left by the trespasser or someone else’s computer. As a result, police must obtain a search warrant for such information (Jan, H. & John L, 2010).
Ethical Issues
However, the ECPA has regulated when and how law-enforcements can intercept and use electronic communications. Prior to this law, it did not address new communication technologies such as email, computer data transmissions, faxes, pagers, and cellular or cordless telephones. Technology is advancing, and laws are simply created to protect the communication by users. Does Congress have the right to continue to add new forms of electronic data, without the public’s acknowledgment? The ECPA also protects electronic and telephone communications from nongovernment. This will lead people to believing they are secured using new technologies for private communications and not to think that someone else is watching or listening. This has increased consumer confidence and helped people decide to buy new technologies (Jan H. & John L, 2010).
To conclude, when the technological era boomed, drastic changes were affecting our everyday lives. New laws were introduced and new threats were imposed upon our rights to privacy and our freedom of speech. The Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) and Children’s Internet Protection Act were created to help protect the innocent and help prosecute the violators. The ECPA was formed to protect against “unreasonable search and seizures” found in the Fourth Amendment right of the United States Constitution. The CIPA was organized under conditions that required public schools and libraries use electronic filtering communication control or parental control to protect minors from harmful materials without violating the first amendment right of freedom of speech.