Pa. Legislature sends wiretap law to Shapiro

Cut-down version of bill concerns Dems

HARRISBURG — With little time to spare, the Pennsylvania Legislature has passed an extension of the state’s soon-to-expire wiretap act that includes an expansion of its carve-out for body cameras but not some of the legal safeguards that legislators had negotiated earlier this year.

The House last week voted to concur with Senate changes to the bill, sending it to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s desk despite concerns from some Democrats that legal guardrails on the collection and use of body camera footage were stripped out of the bill by Senate Republicans.

The bill would amend the state’s wiretap act — which regulates the interception of certain communications, including prohibiting the recording of phone calls without consent — to have the law expire at the end of 2029, as opposed to expiring on Dec. 31 of this year as it is currently scheduled to do.

The bill also expands the act’s carve-out for recordings by certain police devices, extending this to parole agents and corrections officers in order to allow them to use body cameras.

Additionally, the bill was amended when going through the House in September to include a provision allowing Pennsylvanians to record phone calls without notifying the other party if that party is a telemarketer they believe is engaged in predatory behavior, a measure intended to help crack down on phone scams.

Over the summer, House Democrats had also negotiated a set of amendments that would have required parole agents to provide explicit notice of recording and also prohibited the body camera recordings of parole agents and prison staff from being shared with other agencies without a warrant.

But these measures were watered down before the final House vote, which picked up a handful of Republicans in support, and the safeguards were stricken completely by the Senate.

The ACLU had initially given the bill a neutral rating, but later vocally opposed the bill because “Senate amendments gutted hard-fought language that was successfully negotiated between stakeholders before it passed the House,” the group wrote in a memo.

The bill is particularly concerning regarding the civil rights of third parties who might be in the vicinity of a par o l e e and who could be recorded without their knowledge by a parole agent’s body camera — with that recording being passed on to law enforcement without any legal oversight, the ACLU warned.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Chris Pielli, D-Chester County, had lobbied — to no avail — to reinstate the provisions in full force.

“By keeping this in the bill our hopes were to avoid inevitable court litigation that will occur through a myriad of possible right-to-privacy and unreasonable search and seizure issues,” Mr. Pielli said during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on the bill.

“Concerns that a requirement of a warrant may hold up the criminal judicial process, in my humble opinion and experience, does not outweigh the concerns of protecting these rights,” Mr. Pielli continued, adding that he understood the “necessity to compromise for the greater good” given the need for the sunset extension and the interest in expanding body camera use.

The cut-down version of the bill cleared the House, 181-22, on Tuesday, with 16 of those “no” votes coming from Democrats, many of whom had fought to develop the civil rights safeguards.