Remember the movie "Sex, Lies and Videotape"?  I invoke its poetic meter to frame a discussion of civil action privacy law.  Type 4, you will recall, involves civil actions, individuals against individuals, in state court actions known as "torts."  These laws, famously framed out of a 1890 law review article, were the first time the term "privacy" came directly into named U.S. laws.  Putting on my historian's hat, I have argued that this occurrence was not the result of a notion of privacy being "discovered" -- notions of privacy date back to ancient times in Western Culture, and the term itself is derived from Latin -- but because modern, urban, industrial society at the turn of the last century, driven largely by technological developments, not the least of which was photography, encroached so significantly on cultural mores that the law was called upon as a defense to shore up those norms.

This week the Senate Judiciary Committee will work on amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, commonly referred to as "ECPA."  When passed in 1986 it updated the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first "wiretap" federal law.  This law codified procedures for the rule the Supreme Court established in the landmark Katz v. U.S. case that created a Fourth Amendment privacy right in electronic communications, telephony principally in that day.  In my cheat sheet on different kinds of privacy law outlined in the last couple of previous blogs, this would be type 2 privacy law.