Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwargerber. On today's show, should the FBI need a court order to look at your browser history? When it comes to internet metadata, data about who you send things to and receive messages from. What should the standard be?

And should the FBI be allowed to access some of this information without even getting a warrant?

Is this in the spirit of our Constitution?

Should there be more oversight or less?

Joining me to discuss this are two excellent privacy-minded folks from the Center for Democracy

and Technology, Gabe Rotman,

deputy director of the Freedom Security and Technology Project at CDT, and Yasha Butler,

Privacy Surveillance and Security Fellow at CDT.

Folks, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having us.

So before we jump in, let's just define the term that is being used here and the jargon that we'll be using for the rest of the show.

It's electronic communication transactional record that is Ector, and the FBI is asking for what has been referred to in tech reporting as the Ector fix.

Can you explain what an Ector is and what the FBI is asking for?

Sure. An Ector is essentially your digital fingerprint

online. It is every transaction, every communication that you have, or every record of that

communication that you have. So, for example, whenever you type something into your browser,

you send a signal and you get a website in return, that is an Ector. So Ector includes your browsing history.

Ector also includes all of your email records, whom you send emails to, whom you receive emails from.

It includes, in some cases, your location if you are using location tracking for some of

your apps or from some of your devices. And it could also include things like all of your text

message records, very similar to your email records only as whom you are texting. So an

Ector is essentially a record of everything you do online.

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