Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome to the inside scoop I'm cnet's karo tsuboi joined by chief political correspondent Declan McCullough thanks for joining us Declan and today we're discussing the whole idea that the Department of Justice and other government agencies some may and some may not need warrants to access some of our personal information online emails Facebook posts photos tell us a little bit more about this right we're talking about stored data a lot of cloud data and it's kind of weird that you now have the IRS saying last month yeah we're going to require warrants for email and now they're actually more privacy protective than the FBI and the DOJ the Justice Department that is who say well warrants kind of optional depending on the circumstances why are there such inconsistencies between these government agencies and who does that fall onto to make consistent the Obama administration right i mean the book has to stop somewhere would stop at the White House and so far they've been just kind of hands off this issue this is not something that they're really focused on and so at the individual agency set their own policies which is just weird I mean the end of all the stops in Congress and it's it within Congress's power to set rules for not just the FBI and DOJ and IRS but also for state and local law enforcement and their bills pending in Congress some have already been approved by committees but they haven't actually made that way to a floor vote yet and the bills would say that right now if the police want to search your file cabinet at home at home they have to get a search warrant she has been the case for hundreds of years going back to english common law and everyone understands that too look you know you want what my document you need a warrant boy right and there's a lots of good reasons for this and in fact is the police probably at some level like this because they can demonstrate that they're actually following the rules and increases trust in them but what they the problem is that thanks to this law that was enacted in 1986 factoring the days of black-and-white macintosh computers and dial-up modems the search warrant is not required for all emails stored in the cloud so Congress cannot can change this law the courts are doing their own thing in parallel but until they until the Supreme Court or Congress fixes things that we're left with this sort of legal morass uncertainty and different agencies doing there thing that's amazing that a la that's almost 30 years old is kind of dictating modern technology these days but so it is what do you think the implications are of the inconsistencies here on tech companies you know like Google out there like Apple Facebook the big guys right and almost all of those large companies it's an apple and Twitter and Google and so on and even a TNT have signed on to a coalition that that's asking Congress has changed a lot and it's it's good in a way because they're protecting privacy but it's also self-serving and they want to say to Americans there that is their customers you can move to the cloud you it's just as safe as if the files were stored on your laptop at home and so there's and until that happens that the companies are worried and until the law has changed one way or another through the courts were through Congress people going to be not quite as interested in taking advantage of some of these cloud cloud services email documents photos a whole lot of stuff final question I guess back to the consumer if you have anything to hide what should you do to protect yourself right now the answer is encrypted using use strong encryption and store it locally don't put it in the cloud at least if if it's stored locally if someone breaks down your door with a search warrant that you'll know about it thank you so much chief political correspondent Declan McCullough i'm cara de su boy thanks for watching the inside scoop