Under the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, data stored on the cloud lack the privacy standards that apply to locally stored data, like a person’s hard drive. Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy has pledged to update digital privacy law, but CNET reports that a rewritten version of the bill would grant more than 22 federal agencies access to “Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages” without a search warrant.

The bill potentially up for committee vote next week would require a subpoena for searches, and still requires police to obtain warrant under many circumstances. According to CNET, the earlier version of the bill had stricter protections that would have required probable cause for a search warrant. The rewrite reportedly includes major changes:

– Grants more than 22 federal agencies warantless access to American’s electronic correspondence warrantless, with a subpoena.

– Authorizes law enforcement agencies to access accounts without a warrant or court review if there is an “emergency” situation.

– Providers “shall notify” law enforcement in advance of telling users they were target of warrant, order or subpoena.

– Would delay notification of accounts accessed from 3 days to “10 business days,” that can be postponed up to 360 days.

As Americans increasingly use digital services, wireless monitoring has soared, revealing information about users’ location, travel, calling patterns, and texting, while warrants for wiretap surveillance have dropped 14 percent. The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act already leaves e-mails unprotected after 180 days. While it “requires a warrant for the government to access photos, calendars and other private data stored on laptops or desktop computers at home” it does not do the same for “files stored with a service provider in the “cloud.”’

With several reported incidents this election cycle of churches that served as polling places touting their opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion, separation of church and state advocates are reviving calls to eliminate churches as polling sites. In Minnesota, where the Catholic Church has been the most vocal proponent of a ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage, the American Independent noted the following incidents:

In South Saint Paul, Minn., on Election Day, residents showed up at St. John Vianney Catholic Church to vote and were greeted with a banner outside the polling place entrance that read, “Strengthen Marriage, Don’t Redefine It.” [...]

Ivan Kowalenko … told Minnesota Public Radio, “I was shocked, I didn’t think that would be allowed. I was hearing that you’re not allowed to wear any political slogan of your own, so it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate that a voting venue would be allowed to express an opinion.”

At a separate polling place at St. Joseph’s Church in West St. Paul, Stephanie Weiss was waiting in line to vote, and she noticed a sign posted to the wall. It was a prayer, written by Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt, that urged Catholics to defend God’s plan for marriage — between one man and one woman.

Similar incidents occurred in May when North Carolina voted on the ban on same-sex marriage and civil unions:

Open Door Baptist Church in Morehead City put the words “Vote for Marriage” on its marquee the day of the primary election, according to the Carteret County News-Times. Earlier this month, the church doubled down on its politicking with a sign that read, “Vote for life and marriage.”

In Raleigh, North Carolina, Devon Park United Methodist Church put up the words “A true marriage is male and female and God” during the May vote on the constitutional amendment. That church was serving as a polling place.

The church’s pastor, William H. Pearsall Sr., told the Wilmington Star-News that it was his idea and that his church council agreed to put the message up. “We agreed that we needed to stand up for Christian values,” Pearsall said. He also told the paper, “In our church, God’s word never changes and it’s the truth.”

In all three instances in North Carolina, the signs were outside of the buffer zone set by state statute and were, therefore, legal. However, the incidents prompted a call by some residents and advocacy groups to revamp the selection process for polling places.

Even where churches are not posting advocacy materials on Election Day, advocates worry that the polling place gives the impression of impropriety and threaten the neutrality of the site as a place for civic activity. Studies have shown that voting in a church “could activate norms of following church doctrine.” And the Humanist Legal Center has pointed out that the selection of a church building for voting could “amount to an endorsement of religion that marks non-Christian voters as outsiders” and perhaps even more disturbingly, actually skews the results of the voting toward religious views, which amounts to an unconstitutional advancing of religion.” The Center also warns that the selection of churches may burden the right to vote, where “voters are forced to vote in a hostile location that skews the results.”

Churches are no doubt useful public spaces, particularly in small communities that lack other options. But organizations like Americans United for Church and State say if elections officials are going to use churches, they should at the very least better police political messaging at the sites.

Since two states passed ballot initiatives legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, the logistical question remains of exactly how federal officials will respond, when it is still illegal federally. Republican and Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), have urged the Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Agency to back down from enforcement in Washington and Colorado.

In an interview with ABC, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he does not favor federal legalization of marijuana, but finds its legal penalties too harsh:

“States should be allowed to make a lot of these decisions,” Paul says. “I want things to be decided more at a local basis, with more compassion. I think it would make us as Republicans different.” [...]

“I think for example we should tell young people, ‘I’m not in favor of you smoking pot, but if you get caught smoking pot, I don’t want to put you in jail for 20 years,’” Paul says.

Public support for marijuana legalization is at a record-high 50 percent, according to a Gallup poll last year. But in 2010, there were more than 853,000 marijuana-related arrests, 750,000 for mere possession. Of more than 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., more than 500,000 are drug offenders, with African-Americans and Latinos disproportionately impacted. In Colorado, for example, even though African Americans and Latinos make up 3.8 percent and 19 percent of the population, they accounted for 10 to 25 percent of marijuana possession arrests.

As has been the case throughout most of the Obama presidency, there are a host of judicial nominees with bipartisan support pending on the Senate floor. The 19 nominees ready for an immediate confirmation vote would alleviate the vacancy crisis on the federal courts that has left sitting judges overburdened, and pending cases inordinately delayed.

The Republican obstruction that has characterized most of the Obama presidency became particularly acute during the election, as Republicans invoked the so-called “Thurmond rule” to stop judicial confirmations during election season. But now that the election is over, several Republicans are joining Democrats in lamenting the strains caused by this persistently high judicial vacancy rate, and calling for immediate post-election confirmations.

“Now that the elections are behind us, I write to urge you to move forward expeditiously to schedule votes on non-controversial judicial nominees who have bipartisan support,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) wrote in a letter to Senate leadership.

Other Republicans who are calling for confirmations include Oklahoma senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, who are hoping that their state’s stalled nominees will now “fly through.” Even when obstructionist rhetoric was at its height, some senators like Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said in defending their obstruction that “[if] there are excellent nominees by the president to the circuit courts, well, the election is only four months away. If he is re-elected, they can be confirmed in November and December.” But support for post-election confirmations is not shared by all senators, and it only takes one to hold the process and the courts hostage.

“That’s not going to happen in the lame-duck,” Hatch said in an interview with Roll Call. “That will have to wait until next year.”

All of these nominees have already been waiting at least five months, and a few have waited more than a year. President Obama is poised to become the first president in recent history to end his term with more vacancies on the federal courts than he inherited. As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser points out in a recent column for the American Prospect, President Obama is not without fault for this, having failed put his political muscle behind judicial nominations. But 19 of those he did nominate have been cleared by the Senate Judiciary Committee as fit to serve, and there is no reason they shouldn’t start serving tomorrow.

Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice

• Two public interest groups have filed a complaint with the U.N. Committee Against Torture alleging that Canada violated the Torture Convention by failing to investigate and prosecute George W. Bush when he entered the country for U.S. treatment of Guantanamo detainees.
• The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has named University of Maryland law professor Sherrilyn Ifill as its new president. Ifill, who was a lawyer at LDF earlier in her career, is a frequent commentator, and regular contributor to the Root and other publications.
• A federal court is expected to rule this week on a legal challenge to the isolation of HIV-positive prisoners in Alabama and South Carolina.
• A judge won’t halt the construction of California’s high-speed rail project, rejecting a lawsuit by farmers’ unions that alleges the decades-long construction project poses an “imminent threat” to some of the country’s most productive agricultural land.
• In New York, it costs $54,000 to house one inmate for one year, but a college education program for prisoners requires a one-time investment of $35,000 on average and drastically reduces recidivism, Melissa Harris-Perry explains during an in-depth segment on prisons Sunday.