{"id":12629,"date":"2016-01-21T00:57:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-21T08:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/legislator-joins-national-movement-on-privacy-bills\/"},"modified":"2016-01-21T00:57:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T08:57:00","slug":"legislator-joins-national-movement-on-privacy-bills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/legislator-joins-national-movement-on-privacy-bills\/","title":{"rendered":"Legislator joins national movement on privacy bills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>JUNEAU \u2014<\/strong> An Anchorage legislator and the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska announced plans Wednesday to support bills to extend digital privacy protections for students and employees.<\/p>\n<p>Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, plans to introduce one bill to prohibit schools from coercing students into providing access to personal social media accounts and another that would put the same limitation on employers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is designed to get the law to catch up to the constitution in the context of our existing culture,\u201d Josephson said.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s part of an ACLU effort nationwide to increase data privacy that includes the planned introduction of bills in 16 states to address private email access, devices belonging to students, and social media privacy protections for students and employees.<\/p>\n<p>Organizers have cited a Pennsylvania case in which the parents of a 15-year-old student sued after discovering a school district had been remotely activating cameras in school-owned laptops to watch students at home.<\/p>\n<p>Josephson said the bills he intends to introduce should help state law catch up with evolving technology.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne can see pretty easily how an email is simply a digital form of a letter and other than that there\u2019s no difference,\u201d Josephson said. \u201cThe American people would understand instinctively that, without a warrant, if at my home in Anchorage the police invaded it and went through my drawers, that would be an affront.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Josephson, whose party is in the minority in Alaska\u2019s Legislature, said he believed he could get bipartisan support for the bills as they, and the ACLU\u2019s efforts to get similar bills passed nationally, are aimed at keeping the government at arm\u2019s length.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s a very conservative philosophy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>ACLU Alaska Executive Director Joshua Decker said he believed Alaskans would connect with the idea of a right to privacy as it is enshrined in the state\u2019s constitution.<\/p>\n<p>Decker said the ACLU had heard from people in Alaska who had been told by prospective employers that they had to share passwords to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as conditions of employment.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think here in Alaska the idea that we should be able to control what we want to share and with whom we want to share it \u2014 and that it shouldn\u2019t be open to all of our bosses and teachers and principals \u2014 resonates with the state,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>JUNEAU \u2014 An Anchorage legislator and the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska announced plans Wednesday to support bills to extend digital privacy protections for students and employees. Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, plans to introduce one bill to prohibit schools from coercing students into providing access to personal social media accounts and another that would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-12629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12629"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=12629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}