State Senate Rejects Bill Requiring Search Warrants to Access Wider Range of Mainers’ Electronic Data

The Maine State Senate rejected a bill Tuesday aimed at extending search warrant requirements to cover a wide range of Mainers’ electronic data, including that which is kept in cloud storage.

Although the bill was originally aimed at preventing state entities from collaborating with the federal government to collect Mainers’ personal data in a matter that would otherwise be prohibited by state law, the Judiciary Committee amended the bill to address other related goals during its deliberations.

LD 1056 — originally titled An Act Restricting State Assistance in Federal Collection of Personal Electronic Data and Metadata — was introduced by Sen. Eric Brakey (R-Androscoggin) during the prior legislative session and carried over to this year.

In a roll call vote of 24-10, state senators rejected the bill earlier this week.

All Democrat members of the Senate voted against the legislation alongside three Republican lawmakers. The remaining Republican senators voted in favor of the bill. One Democrat senator was excused for the vote.

Members of the Judiciary Committee were largely opposed to the legislation, with nine members voting “ought not to pass.”

Two members of the Committee — including the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Brakey — voted that the bill “ought to pass as amended.”

While the original version of the bill aimed to block state agencies from going beyond their usual data collection authorities in the name of assisting the federal government, the amended version of the bill supported by Brakey and Rep. Jennifer L. Poirier (R-Skowhegan) sought to achieve a different slate of goals.

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The Committee Amendment that was supported by these lawmakers entirely supplanted the original draft of the bill, including its title.

Initially, the bill prohibited “a department, agency, or political subdivision of the State” from aiding federal agencies in the “collection or use of a person’s electronic communications” except under a limited number of circumstances, including if the person gave “informed consent” or if the collection was “pursuant to a warrant.”

LD 1056 also originally would have allowed for the state to work with federal agencies to collect Mainers’ data “in accordance with a legally recognized exception to the federal warrant requirements.”

Click Here to Read the Original Text of LD 1056

Instead of supporting this version of the bill, however, Brakey and Rep. Poirier voted in favor of an amended version that aimed to expand search warrant requirements to cover additional categories of electronic data, as well as institute a new statute regulating the grand jury subpoena process.

The amended version of the bill was titled An Act to Enhance Regulation of the Grand Jury Subpoena Process and Government Access to Electronic Device Information.

Part A of the Committee Amendment would add a section to the portion of Maine State Law governing criminal court procedures that would (1) allow for “a person served with a grand jury subpoena [to] notify any person of the existence of the grand jury subpoena unless a court order prohibiting such action is served with [it]” and (2) require that an attorney for the State notify the subject of a subpoena within a year of the subpoena’s existence, barring that there is “a reason to believe” that notification would “have an adverse result.”

Part B of the Committee Amendment more closely related to the original content of the bill, as it would expand Title 16, Chapter 3, Subchapter 10 of Maine state law to cover a broader range of residents’ electronic data.

Currently, these statutes require government entities to obtain a search warrant in order to access the “content of portable electronic device communications.”

Under the proposed amendment, however, these protections would be extended to the metadata for these communications, as well as “any other information stored on, generated by or transmitted through operation of an electronic device, regardless of whether it is portable.”

LD 1056 as amended would also expand search warrant requirements to any data “stored by remote computing services that provide Internet storage to the public” — also known as cloud storage services.

Click Here to Read the Full Text of LD 1056 As Amended

When the Senate took up consideration of LD 1056 earlier this week, a roll call vote was not taken on the amended version of the bill specifically, but rather on the acceptance of the Judiciary Committee’s majority Ought Not to Pass report released late last month.

As of now, the House has not yet voted on the future of LD 1056.

“In the post-Snowden era, we know that government has a history of demanding from private companies so-called ‘bulk metadata’ — which has amounted to a vast surveillance apparatus upon every single citizen, as if we are cattle to be tracked and traced, not free men and women in a free county,” said Sen. Brakey.

“Without warrant protections for our metadata, we must live with the awareness that Big Brother is watching at all times,” Brakey said.