Who’d have thought a tea party freshman who dropped out of high school would become a media sensation? Representative Jonathan Stickland, a Republican from Bedford—who later got his GED—wasn’t even considering a political career until he received a late-night email from the president of his local tea party group, according to the Austin American-Statesman .
Expectations were low. “Experience counts,” said the Fort Worth Star-Telegram ’s editorial board in May 2012 , in endorsing his opponent, a former city councilman. Stickland nevertheless won the primary, with about sixty percent of the vote (and the general, with about eighty percent—the district is one of those where most of the competition is in the Republican primary). And he didn’t win many fans during the regular session; one reader poll put him among the “worst” legislators of the session. Still, Stickland received positive national attention for his amendment to House Bill 2268, which relates to email privacy in the state.
The amendment, which started as a bill Stickland introduced but went nowhere (as is not uncommon in the Texas lege) closes a loophole in the 1986 Electronics Communication Privacy Act that states law enforcement officers can view opened email without a warrant and can view unopened email six months after it was sent without a warrant. Now that Governor Rick Perry has signed the bill into law , Texas cops and investigators need to file search warrants in order to access all emails, regardless of age.
The law, of course, only applies in the state’s boundaries. The federal government can still snoop on Texans; that much is clear from recent reporting about the National Security Administration’s Prism program , and the federal government’s requests for data from Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. (For more history on this, see this 2004 report from the Washington Post .)
An update of America’s email privacy laws—again, keep in mind that the law in question was enacted 25 years ago, when Stickland was three and email was barely older than that—seems logical enough. The broadest version of the debate is whether American citizens have a constitutional right to privacy, because that right is not explicitly given in the Constitution . Laws and court rulings have established precedents, though, and with every new leap forward in technology, there are new questions about how the logic should be extended . The argument against privacy on telephones when they first appeared was that people didn’t have to use them . That argument, of course, didn’t succeed. And now, with people’s lives revolving more and more around smart phones and access to the Internet, does it make sense to apply old standards to new technology?
In May, four United States congressmen introduced two bills on the subject of email privacy . The bills are apparently dead in the water, though . Looked at from a wide angle, then, Stickland’s amendment is a Band-Aid on a gaping chest wound. However, as tech policy analysts have noted, the amendment, which has made Texas the first state to tackle the subject, has the potential to set a new standard for the rest of the country .
Not bad for a freshman, even if Stickland did subvert the Lege’s longstanding tradition that freshmen should be seen and not heard. So, just how did he become the face of a state bill with national recognition? Last month, he sat down with Texas Monthly to explain. This interview has been edited and abridged for clarity.
Texas Monthly: How did this amendment get started?
Jonathan Stickland: It was a bill that we originally filed . We filed a lot of little bills that were niches--clean-up language and stuff like that. We knew we weren’t going to get any landmark legislation through, so we were trying to find a little niche. There was one report that came out, at the end of last year, that said something about this. It was some email thing, but it was on the federal level. That’s how we found out and started looking into it. And we were like, “Hmm, this is strange.”
So it was on our wish list, and then a Ron Paul-er came in here and said, Hey, have you heard about this? And we kind of commissioned him to start looking into it, and then we came up with the bill and filed it.
TM: Do you think we have a constitutional right to privacy?
JS: I think we do. I think the 4th Amendment goes to that. To me the first and most proper role of government is to ensure our rights, and our right to privacy is included in that as well, or should be. That comes before roads. That comes before schools. That comes before anything else. If government can’t protect our rights, then nothing else matters.
TM: What would you say to the argument that if you want your privacy protected, just don’t use email? You sign up willingly.
JS:Well, I agree from a business standpoint that should be the case, so if I sign up to use Google and Google puts it in their terms of agreement, “Hey, we might sell your stuff or we might go through it” or whatever else—you knowingly entered into that contract. But when you’re dealing with a government agency —I never signed a piece of paper that said they could do whatever they want. I think there is definitely a distinction. When you enter into a business agreement or a contract with somebody, you can deny that or not. But if I can’t walk away from this deal that we have, or this situation, then that’s completely different to me. If you let people opt out of government then that might be the answer [laughs].
TM: Why did you think your amendment or your bill was necessary? Because of Prism?
JS: We started this process beforehand. That only amplified it. In fact, Frullo [John Frullo, a Republican representative from