Sec. 2. Findings
550 words·~3 min read·
/bill/117/s/2547/is/section-2·A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
Congress finds the following: In recent years, criminals have created counterfeit court orders which they have used to trick telecommunications and technology companies into performing illegal wiretaps and removing online content. Counterfeit court orders threaten public trust in the courts, and undermine the privacy of the people of the United States and their rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Secure digital signature technology has existed for decades that solves this problem.
Digital signatures enable recipients of a digital document to verify that it was issued by an authorized entity and that it has not been tampered with or modified since it was digitally signed. Since 1994, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published Federal Information Processing Standard 186–4, which is the official standard for digital signatures for the Federal Government. Since 1998, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act (title XVII of division C of Public Law 105–277 ; 112 Stat. 2681–749) and the amendments made by that Act have required Federal executive branch agencies use digital signatures to conduct official business with the public.
Section 2209 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 ( 6 U.S.C. 659 ), as amended by section 1716 of the William M.
(Mac)Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, requires that subpoenas issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency be authenticated with a cryptographic digital signature and that subpoenas lacking such a digital signature shall not be considered to be valid by the recipient of such subpoena . The legislative branch has also embraced digital signatures. Every bill posted to congress.gov is digitally signed by the Government Publishing Office. Federal, State, and Tribal courts have not kept pace with the adoption of digital signature technology by other branches of government. Illegal wiretaps by their nature involve the interception of private communications that flow over means or instrumentalities of interstate or foreign commerce. Content and data delivered over the internet is a thing in interstate or foreign commerce. To the extent that a counterfeit court order would result in that content being removed from the internet, that counterfeit order affects things in interstate and foreign commerce. Congress may therefore take steps to ensure the authenticity of orders purporting to require the removal of online content in interstate or foreign commerce. Consumers will not continue to do business with telecommunications and technology companies if those companies facilitate surveillance of their private communications or remove their content in response to fraudulent court orders. The absence of digital signatures from court orders places an unreasonable economic burden on telecommunications and technology companies. These companies must either expend significant effort and resources to manually verify the legitimacy of each court order they receive or bear the risk of significant reputational and financial harm. The absence of verifiable digital signatures on court orders therefore creates an unreasonable burden on interstate or foreign commerce of the United States, which Congress has the power to remedy. The adoption of digital signature technology by Federal courts alone will not address the threat of counterfeiting. Criminals have created and passed off counterfeit State court orders and will continue to do so. As such, the legitimacy of and public trust in the courts depends upon every court, Federal, State, and Tribal, adopting digital signature technology.
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- Pub. L. 105-277
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