“In signing SB 703, Governor Brown has made California the first state in the nation to refuse to contract with businesses and other entities that discriminate against their transgender employees in benefits”, said NCLR Government Policy Director Geoff Kors, who drafted San Francisco’s Equal Benefits Ordinance in his former role as legislative chair of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.
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The new requirement means investigators will also have to obtain a search warrant before deploying cell-site simulators known as Stingrays – a secretive tool used by law enforcement that tricks nearby cell phones into revealing their exact location.
After rejecting several similar proposals in years past, Brown on Thursday signed the sweeping Senate Bill 178, which will require law enforcement agencies to obtain warrants before accessing someone’s electronic devices or requesting the private communications stored on them, such as e-mails, text messages and geolocation data.
“For too long, California’s digital privacy laws have been stuck in the Dark Ages, leaving our personal emails, text messages, photos and smartphones increasingly vulnerable to warrantless searches”, said Senator Leno.
The signing makes California the third state, behind Utah and Maine, to enact the warrant provisions for electronic data.
Law enforcement had raised concerns about the law’s effect on child pornography investigations, but there are exceptions in cases where there is “an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to a person, that requires access to the electronic information without delay.”
After months of pressure from public interest groups, media organizations, privacy advocates, tech companies, and thousands of members of the public, California’s elected leaders have updated the state’s privacy laws so that they are in line with how people actually use technology today. “That ends today with… a carefully crafted law that protects personal information of all Californians”. The bill was co-sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union of California, Electronic Frontier Foundation and California Newspaper Publishers Association.
The law places California not only at the forefront of protecting digital privacy among states, it outpaces even the federal government, where such efforts have stalled. “Californians deserve warrant protection for their sensitive electronic communications”. The new law changes that, he added. But while the state amendment ensured a right to privacy for all Californians, lawmakers couldn’t envision the technological advances that would come in the decades to follow.
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In August, Twitter reported a 52 percent jump in the number of law enforcement requests for user data this year in its annual transparency report.
