E-mail

The Senate Judiciary Committee Friday unanimously approved a “very overdue” bill that would require law enforcement officials to get a warrant before accessing e-mail messages, updating a dated privacy law.

The proposed amendments are historic and will create a consistent method for handling government access to online communications, said Sophia Cope, director of government affairs at the Newspaper Association of America. But the measure likely won’t go to the Senate this year, forcing the process to start over again next year, she said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and EarthRights International have filed motions to quash subpoenas issued by Chevron Corp. to three e-mail providers for the data and location information of more than 100 email accounts over the span of nearly a decade.

The subpoenas, which were issued in federal courts to Google and Yahoo in San Franciso and Microsoft in New York City at the beginning of October, represent Chevron’s latest attempt in an ongoing legal battle to prove that an Ecuadorian judge falsified information in an $18 billion lawsuit against the oil giant.

An Alaska Supreme Court decision makes private e-mail messages containing government business subject to the state Public Records Act but also makes obtaining those records difficult.

Friday's ruling held that the state Public Records Act does not prohibit public officials from conducting government business through their private e-mail accounts, potentially posing difficulties for people seeking to access those messages in the future, Alaska media lawyer D. John McKay said in an interview.

Rhode Island's governor signed into law yesterday what open records advocates have called the first major revisions in 14 years to its Access to Public Records Act -- changes that will both make more records available and give requestors more rights under the act.

The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court held Monday that written requests for records that do not comply with certain agency-specific request policies cannot merely be ignored.

Electronic communications -- specifically tweets, text and e-mail messages -- between city officials discussing public business are subject to the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, even if they were sent from personal cellphones and accounts, a state circuit judge ruled.

E-mail correspondence among school board members prior to the controversial closing of a public elementary school did not constitute secret meetings that violate Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

A New York appellate court ruled on Thursday that courts need to consider the “freewheeling, anything-goes” writing style that prevails on the Internet when evaluating Internet communications for libel.