Welcome to this module on Telecommunications and ISP'S. The subtitle here is Correspondence. That's because we are going to deal with all aspects of Internet, telecommunications, mobile telecommunications, and the like. But first, we will see what goals we are trying to achieve with this module. The goal is that we are going to see different laws and different judgments done by different lawyers, different judges, different courts all over the United States. The elements which play a huge role here is when we are dealing with communications, with correspondence, with having access to internet, and the like. First, I would like to bring a few things into remembering what we dealt with in earlier modules, namely that when we are striving for, and are using our liberty to make or create more safety, then the outcome might be that in the end, we will neither have liberty nor safety, as one of the founding fathers of the USA said Benjamin Franklin. In the last lecture, we talked about the constitutional protection under the Fourth Amendment against governmental intrusion, and I dealt with in great detail in the three cases that you see here, Olmstead versus the United States, Katz versus United States, and Carpenter versus United States. That encompasses all the important issues when dealing with governmental intrusion into the private life of people under scrutiny by those governmental institutions. All of this changed with the advent of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. From then on, the war on terrorism became very important and a whole bunch of laws were created to have access to all types of correspondence which was possible and which was arranged for us, so to speak, with the advent of the internet and the growth in mobile telecommunications. From that moment on, a whole bunch of omnibus laws, bills, acts, have been enacted to create or to change a whole series of acts that are already in place. At that moment, the Bush administration enacted Patriot Act, where you can see that they use the acronym to really tell what the act is about. The same happened with the Freedom Act under the Obama administration. Then there was a new act enacted by the Trump administration on all the data that are being stored in the Cloud. When it's not available straightforward to American companies or the American security organizations, then Cloud tech will arrange for that. These three acts, the Patriot Act, Freedom Act and the Cloud tech, they changed a number of acts which were already a long time and place, namely the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1968 one of the fathers, there was Robert Kennedy, Then there is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which is from a later date, and the Stored Communications Act. These acts are bills were already in place. The Patriot Act, Freedom Act, and Cloud tech changed all these laws. Thank you for watching this lecture. The next one will be on the different aspects of the FISA and the FISA Court, and ECPA and the Start Communications Act.
