He didn't "scuttle" it. CNet saw draft language being circulated among Senators and reported on it. Leahy issued a clarification, saying that he didn't support the draft language. Leahy's own language eliminates the 180-day rule for warrantless access to email, which is a <i>huge step forward</i> for email privacy.<p>Unless Leahy is directly lying in his statement, what CNet's reporter did was to play "gotcha" with draft senate language. While this may make us feel better, like we all played a role in ensuring that a terrible bill wasn't passed, what it really does is ensure that senators and their staffs will work even harder to make sure we don't see draft bill language until it is more or less a fait accompli and the only two outcomes are "pass" or "discard".<p>Patrick Leahy has one of the better reputations in the whole senate on civil liberties issues (check out the ACLU scorecard). But yeah, let's definitely eat our own to ensure ideological purity. That worked super well for the Tea Party.
As the Internet we need to do two things, one start getting our sorry little asses in congress to stop this stuff where it starts.<p>Two, build better technology that is not such an easy target. If individual keys were required to decrypt messages, then it's hard to take the data without your permission because cryptography prevents that.<p>This might be a good enough reason to switch off of email, especially email like gmail.