The initiative promises consumers “control” over the personal information businesses glean from “tracking and collection devices” – and seeks to restore privacy rights at a time of “accelerating encroachment on personal freedom and security.” It would apply to all businesses, ranging from internet service providers to websites to cellphone companies.

The proposal has sparked concern in tech-friendly California, given that it could impose significant costs on everything from small-time websites to major internet players such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. If the measure qualifies for the ballot and is approved by voters, it would apply not only to California-based internet companies, but to any entity that does business in the state. So, it could have national reverberations.

“Forcing companies to allow consumers to opt out of tracking, and not allowing those companies to charge more or deny service to consumers who do opt out, would be burdensome for websites and application developers, and would significantly hurt the advertising industry since it would decrease the amount of targeted advertising they can do,” said Tom Struble, tech policy manager at the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C.

The initiative would provide consumers with four new “rights” that would be inserted into the state Constitution. First, consumers would have the right to learn about the categories of personal information that any business has collected from them. Second, consumers would have the right to know how that specific personal information is being used – i.e., whether it has been sold or shared for marketing or advertising purposes.

Third, consumers would have the right to “direct a business” not to sell or share that information. Finally, the initiative grants consumers the right to “equal service or price,” which means the business would be forbidden from charging different prices or limiting services if a consumer directs a business not to use the information.

Companies would be required to honor a consumer’s information request within 30 days and provide it at no charge. The initiative requires companies to set up a toll-free telephone number and website by which consumers could make a “verifiable” request.

The initiative’s backers argue that consumers “are in a position of relative dependence on businesses” that collect this information and that it is difficult for them “to monitor business operations or prevent companies from using your personal information for the companies’ financial benefit.”

Critics, however, argue that the measure doesn’t make necessary distinctions. Unlike a bill now in the California Legislature, it doesn’t distinguish between, say, internet service providers that operate essentially like paid utilities and businesses that offer access to their websites and are paid based on advertising fees. It also does nothing about a potentially greater threat to privacy – collection of data by state and local governments.

The issue has gotten more attention since April, when President Donald Trump signed a law that repealed some Obama-era Federal Communications Commission rules. The rules would have required internet service providers to get permission before using a customer’s information, such as their browsing history, to create targeted online advertisements.

The California Legislature is now trying to restore some of those Obama-era rules. Assembly Bill 375 was designed to “protect California consumers since Congress and the Trump administration effectively halted a set of federal consumer privacy protection rules on internet service providers that were scheduled to take effect,” according to the state Senate Judiciary Committee analysis.

AB375 applies only to broadband providers. As the thinking goes, “people pay heavily for internet service,” which “is akin to a must-have utility,” explained the San Diego Union-Tribune in an editorial supporting the bill. By contrast, Facebook and Google provide their services for free. Consumers presumably know that the “cost” of maintaining a Facebook page and searching for information on a web browser is that those companies can sell targeted advertisements based on one’s search and buying habits.

The bill was referred to the Senate Rules Committee Tuesday following some technical amendments and is likely make it to the Senate floor by Friday’s end-of-session deadline. The initiative has been cleared for signature-gathering. It would go far beyond the intent of AB375 by imposing new requirements on every type of firm that operates in the state.

Consumer initiatives have met with varied levels of success in California over the years. The most recent, Proposition 45, would have “required changes to health insurance rates, or anything else affecting the charges associated with health insurance, to be approved by the California Insurance Commissioner before taking effect.” It lost 59 percent to 41 percent.

The big question with all initiatives is whether their backers have the millions of dollars necessary to collect signatures and then run a successful general election campaign. Given the far-reaching implications of the proposal, Californians can expect aggressive push-back from the tech community if this one starts looking like a serious deal.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

FBI data collection program exposed

Good morning, so close to Friday!

After years of operating under the radar, the cover has been pulled back on an FBI program, centered around Southern California, to amass iris scan information in a federal database.

CalWatchdog has more.

In other news: 

• The FPPC will consider a measure that would “allow state regulators to require suspected lobbyists to provide evidence showing whether they’re being paid to influence government officials,” reports The San Jose Mercury News/AP.
• “Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration now says it will consider requiring homebuilders to pay construction workers at rates equivalent to union wages as part of its effort to streamline housing development across California,” writes the Los Angeles Times.
• Why is Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is having such a great time at the Republican National Convention? The answer? It’s easy to pick fights to rally supporters back in CA. The Sacramento Bee has more.  
• Who is Dean “Dino” Cortopassi, 78, the man behind Prop. 53, which would require voter approval of any public works project funded by at least $2 billion of revenue bonds? Capitol Weekly has more.

Legislature:

• Gone ’til August

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @jstorres

After years of operating under the radar, the cover has been pulled back on an FBI program, centered around Southern California, to amass iris scan information in a federal database.

“To create that pool of scans, the FBI has struck information-sharing agreements with other agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and local law enforcement departments. California has been most aggressive about collecting scans, but agencies in Texas and Missouri can also add to and search the system,” the Verge reported. “The result amounts to a new national biometric database that stretches the traditional boundaries of a pilot program, while staying just outside the reach of privacy mandates often required for such data-gathering projects.”

“In California, the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino have contributed scans, with the latter’s sheriff’s department harvesting more than 200,000 scans alone,” as Mashable noted. “An average of 189 iris scans were collected every day at the start of 2016.” 

According to the Verge, those scans were collated and sent to the FBI by the California Department of Justice, which signed a memorandum with the Bureau in 2013 that set down the responsibilities of each. “The document says only that the FBI will handle information from the project ‘lawfully,’ while California must ‘comply with its state privacy laws,'” the site noted. “The FBI has said the program is bound by internal information security standards.”

Ready and willing

Southern California law enforcement agencies appeared eager to help spearhead the program, signing up again and again to participate. While California’s effort “was scheduled to run for one year and then be reassessed,” the site added, “it’s been renewed each year since 2013,” with Steve Fischer, Chief of Multimedia Productions at the FBI’s CJIS Division, estimating the so-called pilot program would “continue for 2 to 3 additional years.” 

Treatment of the undertaking as a pilot has made relative sense given its current scope and future aims. “The iris scan program, like the facial scans, is part of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) database,” a system with “a broad purview including employment background checks and identifying unknown corpses as wall as use in criminal, terrorist, and intelligence investigations,” according to Yahoo Tech. Pushing to develop the technology out of “fears of another 9/11-style attack,” IB Times reported, “the FBI signed a $1 billion contract with military behemoth Lockheed Martin to develop and launch the unit.” Details haven’t emerged on how large of a database, or how many years of activity, might have been considered before expanding iris scans nationwide.

Drawing criticism

Predictably, California civil liberties advocates and activists have swiftly lined up against the scheme. “What we’re seeing is how counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics are being codified into everyday policing,”  Stop LAPD Spying founder Hamid Khan told the Times. “In essence, we’re all suspects.” Nicole Ozer, ACLU California’s policy director for technology and civil liberties, told the Verge it was “very troubling” that “these systems have gone forward without any public debate or oversight that we’ve been able to find[.]”

But in Southern California, where San Bernardino was left reeling in the face of one of the nation’s most shocking terror attacks, officials’ relationship with the FBI has grown close. Northern California heavyweight Apple fought the Bureau’s demand to unlock the cellphone belonging to the shooter, raising questions “over whether technology companies’ encryption technologies protect privacy or endanger the public by blocking law enforcement access to information,” the Washington Post recalled. By collecting iris scans on its own, federal law enforcement could help ensure that the information might later be construed as personal data protected by private companies.

As state drivers’ changing habits undermined roughly a hundred years of gasoline taxes, California officials debuted a controversial new pilot program designed to make up the difference.

“The state of California is looking for 5,000 volunteers this summer for an experiment with potentially major pocketbook ramifications,” the Sacramento Bee noted. The so-called California Road Charge pilot program, proposed by the state Legislature, has tasked “Caltrans and other transportation officials to set up a nine-month test to see what it would be like if drivers paid for state road repairs based on how many miles they drive in their cars or trucks rather than how many gallons they buy at the pump.”

Aiming for a July start and a nine-month run, the program “already has a list of 4,300 people who are game,” according to Next City. “Participants will continue to pay the pump tax, but receive simulated monthly statements detailing how much they would pay under a road usage system.”

Losing gas

With gas prices, gas taxes and gasoline usage all sinking, lawmakers have labored to settle on a different way to collect revenue from road usage. “In California, drivers now pay 30 cents per gallon, plus 18 cents a gallon in federal tax,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“Not only are politicians averse to raising the tax — which hasn’t been bumped up since 1994, with polls showing extreme distaste from voters — but also the continuing rise in fuel efficiency and the boom in electric vehicles ensure the steady evaporation of revenues even as more cars roll up more miles on the road. Gas taxes are expected to bring in $4.5 billion this fiscal year, 16 percent less than last year and 21 percent less than in 2014. Projections call for revenues to drop another 6.5 percent in the coming year.”

Just last month, regulators signaled the shifts to come by throwing their weight behind a further drop in the gas tax. “California drivers will pay 2.2 cents less per gallon of gasoline, starting in July, after a divided Board of Equalization voted to cut the excise tax,” according to U-T San Diego.

“‘Lowering the rate is the right thing to do and I’m sure Californians will welcome this reduction,’ board vice chair George Runner said in a statement after the agency voted 3-2 to pass the reduction that was recommended by BOE staff.”

Making the transition

From a regulatory standpoint, moving toward a per-mile tax would offer an additional advantage — a relatively smooth and seamless transition from a logistical and bureaucratic standpoint. Of the four vendors recruited to track mileage in the new pilot program, three “are already providing bonus services to fleet managers based on vehicle data,” according to Techwire.net.

“Azuga currently offers fleets a device they plug straight into a vehicle’s OBDII computer — a standard component in all vehicles made after 1996. Aside from automatically reporting mileage back to fleet managers, the computer is what alerts drivers to specific problems in the engine and can also offer information about what’s going on under the hood,” the site noted. “Two of the other companies signed up to track the mileage of participants in California’s test program, Intelligent Mechatronic Systems and EROAD, offer similar services. The fourth vendor, Arvato Mobility Solutions, will manage the accounts.”

Although privacy advocates have expressed skittishness and dismay, many Californians have grown accustomed to their driving habits being monitored electronically. California Road Charge will offer “the option to allow the state to monitor their in-vehicle computer, tracking where they go so they aren’t charged for the use of private or out-of-state roads,” Next City noted. “Recognizing that many will see this as an intrusion on their privacy, the state is testing other ways to collect this data, like periodic odometer reading verifications. California will also experiment with offering drivers weekly or monthly “all-you-can-drive” passes.”

The contretemps began Feb. 1, when Sacramento-based U.S. District Judge Kimberly Jo Mueller ruled in a long-running case pitting the Morgan Hill Concerned Parents Association vs. the California Department of Education. The association, a small nonprofit run by parents of the disabled, sued the California Department of Education in 2011, contending that public schools do a poor job of evaluating, classifying and educating the disabled. Mueller agreed to allow the association to be given direct access to the state’s primary education database so it could have a data expert analyze the records of the 10 million students in California public schools since Jan. 1, 2008.

Mueller’s nod to privacy concerns: Parents who wanted to opt their children out were given until April 1 to print out a form on a state website and mail it to her courtroom. But her ruling wasn’t publicized until Feb. 16, meaning parents only had about six weeks to comply. When it made the news, the idea that in the year 2016 an online opt-out form wasn’t available triggered disbelief — as did the idea that 10 million students’ privacy might be at risk.

“It’s just hard to fathom that a judge would allow such an overexposure of children’s information,” Sherry Skelly Griffith, the executive director of the California State Parent Teacher Association, told USA Today.

Facebook, Twitter and newspaper letters columns filled up with complaints about Mueller’s ruling.

Judge takes shot at accuracy of social media

At an emergency hearing Feb. 29, the judge changed course, ruling that while disability-rights activists could still review the database, it would remain at all times under the control of the state government.

In a court order posted online last week outlining her new finding, Mueller described the process that led to her Feb. 1 decision, suggesting she had done nothing wrong and complaining that the nature of her ruling was being misreported on social media:

The response to the notice thus far demonstrates, on the one hand, the imperfect fit between the [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] FERPA regulation crafted in and largely unchanged since the 1970s, before the Internet as we know it was a gleam in any but an academics’ eye, and on the other, the social media environment in which information is churned and transformed in a nanosecond or less. Whatever the exact trajectory of the Notice may have been, within several days of the CDE’s posting of the approved Notice on its website, the opportunity to register an objection was translated variously as encouragement to object lest “all general education and special education student data that CDE has collected since January 1, 2008” be “release[d].”

But the privacy flap might not be over yet. Mueller didn’t change findings in her Feb. 1 ruling that could lead to the Morgan Hill Concerned Parents Association being given unsupervised access to the health and behavioral records of hundreds of thousands of special-education students and to six years of results of the Statewide Testing and Reporting tests given to all students until they were phased out in July 2013 and replaced by another test broadly measuring academic advancement.

This decision prompted sharp criticism from Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum, who told the San Jose Mercury-News, “This information should never be released” and that it was “inappropriate” for the state of California to ever provide such a vast amount of private student information to any outside entity.

Mueller, a 58-year-old appointed to the federal bench in 2010 by President Obama, served on the Sacramento City Council from 1987 to 1992, her online biography notes. She left the council to attend Stanford Law School.

“The law expands the state’s definition of invasion of privacy to include sending a drone over private property to make a recording or take photos,” as BBC News reported. It was passed as Assembly Bill 856 and introduced by Assemblyman Ian Calderon, D-Whittier.

Wielding the veto

Just weeks ago, Brown had refused to sign yet another bill that would have extended trespassing law to include similar activity. The bill, Brown warned, “could expose the occasional hobbyist and the FAA-approved commercial user alike to burdensome litigation and new causes of action,” the Los Angeles Times noted.

Three other drone-curbing bills vetoed by Brown “would have prohibited civilians from flying aerial drones over wildfires, schools, prisons and jails,” the Times reported separately. “The governor rejected those and six other bills that would have created new crimes or penalties for misconduct including using bullhooks to handle elephants, allowing explosions in drug labs and removing GPS tracking devices from paroled sex offenders. Brown said in a veto message that there are already laws available to deal with any problems addressed by the bills.”

In his veto statement, Brown complained that the drone bills fell into the pattern of “finding a novel way to characterize and criminalize conduct that is already proscribed. This multiplication and particularization of criminal behavior creates increasing complexity without commensurate benefit.”

Legislative frustration

The author of the three bills, state Sen. Ted Gaines, R-El Dorado, made his dissatisfaction plain in recent remarks to the press. “I think it’s dumb,” Gaines said, according to Southern California Public Radio. “Aren’t we supposed to be protecting the public? If I’m an elected official — he’s the governor, I’m a senator — isn’t one of our key roles that we play in public service to protect the public, and certainly Cal Fire employees?”

The discovery that hobbyists’ drones had interfered with firefighting this summer had fueled the push for criminalizing that activity. “The U.S. Forest Service has repeatedly posted reminders warning people that a collision between a hobbyist drone and the low-flying aircraft and helicopters used to fight wildfire could cause damage to the aircraft and injuries to the pilots and people below,” Ars Technica reported. “Despite the warnings, drone sightings keep happening over wildfires, causing the U.S. Forest Service thousands of dollars in aborted flyovers.”

But the private use of drones raised broader concerns including the safety of commercial aircraft. “A couple years ago, it was 200,000, so it is increasing geometrically, and I think it was a mistake for the governor not to see ahead into the future in terms of the chronic aspect of drone use, in the wrong way, in the state of California,” added Gaines. Along with Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, Gaines had hoped to increase the penalty for interfering with firefighting to $5,000 and up to six months in jail “if the drone interference was ruled reckless and intentional,” Ars noted.

Analysts sympathetic to the legislation suggested that lawmakers were justified in their impatience with the federal government’s pace in crafting drone regulations of its own. “In the state of California, it is already a misdemeanor to ‘engage in disorderly conduct that delays or prevents a fire from being timely extinguished’ or to prevent emergency responders from discharging their duties,” noted Justin Peters in Slate. “Legislators’ attempts to get specific are a function of frustration, both with drone operators whose actions too often defy common sense and with a federal government that is taking its sweet time to come up with comprehensive regulations for an industry that desperately needs them.”

In an all-too-real conflict between man and machine, a string of high-profile clashes between drones and public servants has helped spur an effort to crack down on the airborne bots in California.

But at the same time, civil libertarian concerns have prompted a parallel controversy over law enforcement’s desire to use more drones to fight crime.

Crossing the line

Along with Golden State legislators, members of California’s Congressional delegation have grown concerned that so-called recreational drones, flown by private citizens, have become a serious threat to the state’s ability to safely operate in its own airspace. “Without common sense rules, I believe it’s only a matter of time before there’s a tragic accident,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in an emailed statement reported by Emergency Management:

“Feinstein and other lawmakers are demanding that regulators revise existing law to plug a loophole sparing recreational drones from the regulations. They are also are seeking the use of software that would prevent drones from flying in prohibited areas.”

In Sacramento, meanwhile, lawmakers faced a battery of drone bills. One group focused on invasions of privacy; as the Orange County Register reported, state Sen. Ted Gaines, R-Rocklin, offered bills aimed at clearing the skies over public schools, prisons and jails — measures that have already passed the state Senate and await a vote in the Assembly appropriations committee. Other bills would extend trespassing and other privacy laws to cover the use of drones over private property and in otherwise private areas. 

Gaines has also partnered up with Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, to target drones flown over wildfires. As CalWatchdog reported previously, drones disrupted aerial firefighting in California four times over the course of the month of July alone. The Gaines-Gatto bills would make that kind of interference a misdemeanor and exempt firefighters from liability for neutralizing offending drones.

A spreading problem

In addition to complicating California’s efforts to fight fires, dismaying drone-related incidents have begun to spread across the country. As the Washington Post noted, “drones have smuggled drugs into an Ohio prison, smashed against a Cincinnati skyscraper […] and nearly collided with three airliners over New York City.”

“Earlier this summer, a runaway two-pound drone struck a woman at a gay pride parade in Seattle, knocking her unconscious. In Albuquerque, a drone buzzed into a crowd at an outdoor festival, injuring a bystander. In Tampa, a drone reportedly stalked a woman outside a downtown bar before crashing into her car.”

But California has remained a drone hotspot a cut above the rest. Drug runners have begun testing out the use of drones to ferry payloads across the border. “Drones as a drug-smuggling tool made news in January when one hauling meth crashed in the parking lot of a Tijuana shopping center, two miles from the U.S. border,” according to U-T San Diego. “It was loaded with about seven pounds of drugs and was likely being ferried from neighborhood to neighborhood, Mexican law enforcement said.”

Just this month, U-T added, two men pleaded guilty to picking up 28 pounds of heroin delivered by drone near Calexico, “a pickup that was captured on Border Patrol cameras on April 28, according to court records.”

Also this month, a helicopter air ambulance taking a patient to the hospital “had to take evasive action to avoid a mid-air collision with a drone aircraft Wednesday afternoon north of Fresno Yosemite International Airport,” according to the Fresno Bee. 

Police interest

The sense of uncertainty pervading the airspace has been compounded by Sacramento’s inability to deal with the prospect of expanded law enforcement drone usage. One bill underscoring the problem, AB56, set out to strike a balance by requiring warrants for drone surveillance over private property and new police standards for privacy, including the storage and deletion of video footage recorded by drone, as the Associated Press noted. 

But the bill hit against opposition from both sides, with the ACLU and law enforcement organizations both expressing displeasure over the attempted compromise. The bill’s author, Assemblyman Bill Quirk, D-Hayward, expressed his frustration to the AP. “There’s a middle ground that nobody likes,” he sighed. 

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory goes even further. As Vox reported last month, it no longer believes there is any technical barrier to “a grid running on 100 percent wind and solar.”

This view counters the conventional wisdom. A comprehensive study by Cornell electrical engineer Eilyan Bitar released earlier this year is highly skeptical that a grid system could be reliable without traditional “bulk power generation.”

All of which makes recent developments with California’s wind- and solar-power industries of acute interest. According to a global-energy blog run by McGraw-Hill’s financial information branch …

In the first quarter of this year, with unseasonably warm dry weather tamping down wind flows in California, the amount of power generated by the state’s 44 wind farms fell off by around 35% compared to the first quarter of 2014, according to data filed with the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Energy Information Administration … .

 

While that was a first, clear signal that wind power had its distinct draw-backs, but two more recent dates — June 8 and 9 — seemed something like days of reckoning for renewables in California.

 

As demand for power rose and generation surged to meet it, rain, widespread cloud cover and poor wind pushed down the amount of wind and solar generation available to help meet the demand. Because of the shortage of renewables, prices surged.

‘Microgrids’ meshing with the ‘Internet of things’

This relative unreliability is why Bitar thinks the answer going forward is “microgrids.” This is from a physics blog run by Cornell:

In an intelligent grid, this variability in supply would be balanced through the coordination of flexible distributed energy resources at the periphery of the system. Power would be produced locally and consumed locally, giving rise to self-sufficient communities or cities, called microgrids. Such an approach would decrease the need to transmit bulk power hundreds of miles to counterbalance fluctuations in renewable sources.

 

The architecture of such a system, which requires sensors and actuators in appliances, electric vehicles and the like, isn’t the hard part, Bitar said. The hard part is the design of algorithms to efficiently manage the deluge of information produced by those sensors in order to coordinate the simultaneous control of millions of distributed energy resources on fast time scales.

This in turn suggests the “Internet of things” that Americans have been told is just around the corner — in which an online network constantly monitors and links humans, appliances and machines — would also be an extension of the electricity grid.

Privacy advocates would then have a new area to worry about — individual energy use being subject to 24-7-365 monitoring.

An essay in the Guardian earlier this year raised such concerns.

Determining data control

Assembly Bill 886, authored by Assemblyman Ed Chau, D-Monterey Park, “would force Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing companies to follow stricter privacy rules,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “AB886 specifies that the smartphone-ordered ride services cannot disclose any data on passengers except to combat fraud or other crimes. It also says the companies must destroy all personal information when customers cancel their accounts.”

Uber has had an easier time pushing back against AB24, a bill focused around ensuring Uber drivers face the same security checks and guarantees as cab and livery drivers. Last year, an early version of the bill, authored by Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian, D-Los Angeles, died in committee, the Chronicle noted. Uber and other rideshare services succeeded in lobbying hard enough to keep it from a vote. But now, the regulatory push has returned. Much like the old, Nazarian’s new bill would “compel ride-hailing companies like Lyft, Uber and Sidecar to obtain fingerprint background checks similar to those used for taxi, limo and bus drivers. It also would require the companies to institute random drug and alcohol testing of drivers, and to receive immediate notifications from the Department of Motor Vehicles when drivers are arrested or convicted for driving under the influence, reckless driving or other serious violations.”

Uber has restarted its campaign against the would-be measure, but the challenge has come at a difficult time. Litigation driving at the heart of the company’s business has begun to pile up.

Employees or drivers?

Uber has been drawn deeper into two more rounds of potentially painful litigation. Uber has come under fire not only for denying that its drivers are employees, but for failing to provide adequate services for the blind.

In Douglas O’Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc., the plaintiffs claimed “that drivers are employees of Uber, as opposed to its independent contractors, and thus are eligible for various statutory protections for employees codified in the California Labor Code § 351.”

“But it also claims that Uber has a requirement under the California Labor Code as an employer to pass on the entire amount of any gratuity ‘that is paid, given to, or left for an employee by a patron.’ The lawsuit not only implies that Uber denied drivers proper wages and reimbursements for driving expenses by misclassifying them as contractors, but also that Uber’s app charges are the 100 percent of tips that are owed to the drivers.”

The ramifications of the suit could be sweeping. Since its creation, Uber’s business model has hinged on its classification of its drivers as non-employees. By avoiding the cost of providing drivers employee benefits, Uber has been able to obtain a multi-billion-dollar valuation and expand at a rapid rate. As Fusion Senior Editor Felix Salmon has observed, “just because Uber is making huge amounts of money from its drivers doesn’t mean that it’s ripping them off.” That intuitive argument, however, may not sway the courts.

Driving the blind

Simultaneously, Uber was dealt a separate defeat in litigation over its obligations under federal disability law. As Reuters reported, “U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins in San Jose, California, said the plaintiffs could pursue a claim that Uber is a ‘travel service’ subject to potential liability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

“The judge rejected Uber’s arguments that the plaintiffs, including the National Federation of the Blind of California, lacked standing to sue under the ADA and state laws protecting the disabled.”

Uber, Reuters noted, has just days to respond.

State Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, repackaged some of his long-cherished plans for law enforcement reform in Senate Bill 178, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or Cal-ECPA. In a press release, Leno’s office described SB178 as a prudent piece of legislation with enough exceptions to ensure public safety and effective policing:

“Cal-ECPA protects all electronic communications, including personal messages, passwords and PIN numbers, GPS data, photos, medical and financial information, contacts and metadata. Exceptions to the warrant requirement are included in the legislation so that law enforcement officers can continue to effectively and efficiently protect public safety in the event of an emergency.”

A string of failures

Leno has tried and failed to enact similar legislation in the recent past.

His troubles emerged in the wake of a controversial California Supreme Court ruling in 2007. The plaintiff, Gregory Diaz, was incriminated after an arrest when an officer with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department scrolled through the text messages on Diaz’s cellphone. The justices sided against Diaz, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Diaz’ case.

So in 2011, Leno’s attempt to require warrants for cellphone searches fell prey to a veto from Gov. Jerry Brown — even though it passed the Assembly unanimously. As CNN reported, Brown warned that “courts are better suited to resolve the complex and case-specific issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizures protections.”

Then in 2012, as the Sacramento Bee reported, state district attorneys and Brown sank a bill Leno introduced that would have required warrants for any search of location data. And in 2013, they did the same to a related bill that mandated a warrant for emails requested from Internet service providers.

New Allies

But this time, political attitudes have shifted enough that Leno has reasoned he stands a better chance at success. He found a co-author for SB178 in State Sen. Joel Anderson, R-Alpine, known for introducing privacy-related bills that would have shielded Covered California data and prohibited state cooperation with the NSA in unwarranted surveillance activities.

What’s more, Leno was able to marshal the support of Silicon Valley luminaries, whose endorsement was key to building credibility and challenging California’s district attorneys. His bill, KQED reported, received the okay from titans like Google and Microsoft to social media heavyweights like Twitter and Facebook.

And it was backed by smaller startups like Dropbox, which offers secure online data storage.

In a statement released by Mufaddal Ezzy, California manager of public policy and government relations for Google, SB178 was portrayed as a natural extension of current Fourth Amendment protections against searchs and seizures:

“Law enforcement needs a search warrant to enter your house or seize letters from your filing cabinet — the same sorts of protections should apply to electronic data stored with Internet companies. California’s electronic surveillance laws need to be brought in line with how people use the Internet today and provide them with the privacy they reasonably should expect.”

Clarity in the courts

Most importantly of all, Leno finally has the U.S. Supreme Court in his corner. As Ars Technica reported, the court ruled unanimously in a 2014 case, Riley v. California, that warrants must be required to search a cellphone.

Instead of posing an awkward challenge to the courts, as Brown feared years ago, Leno’s desired protections would instead officially square California law with the holding in Riley.

While SB178 makes its way through Sacramento, Californians interested in privacy issues will also keep an eye on Washington, D.C. There, Congress will consider the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act, introduced by a bipartisan group of three lawmakers, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.