This week California passed a new law designed to end the warrant-less collection of online data by the state’s law enforcement officials. California’s governor Jerry Brown signed the new Electronic Communications Privacy Act into law. Google’s general counsel, Kent Walker, released a statement to Politico to “applaud Governor Brown's decision to sign the...bill, which updates California law to better reflect how people use the web today. Law enforcement has long needed a search warrant to enter your house or seize letters from your filing cabinet -- the same protections should apply to electronic data as well.” Facebook and Twitter were also official proponents of the new bill. 

In a statement regarding the new law, Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director at the ACLU, said “This is a landmark win for digital privacy and all Californians. We hope this is a model for the rest of the nation in protecting our digital privacy rights.” Current US law does not require federal law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant in order to conduct surveillance of online communication, including surveillance conducted in the state of California.  A small number of US states have updated their surveillance laws to include a focus on electronic information, though most states still work under surveillance laws lacking amendments from the days of analog surveillance.  

California’s new law is considered to be more in keeping with technology trends and privacy advocacy than previous attempts to update surveillance laws at the state level. According to CNET, “The California law covers a huge range of data, from the content of text and email messages to files stored remotely on cloud services to the location of cell phones,” as well as “metadata, the time stamps and other information that follow around internet files and can prove who wrote an email when and from what location.” The ACLU’s official statement calls the new law an important update which allows “California's privacy protections to reflect the modern digital world and reinforces constitutional rights to privacy.”