As Congress mulls changes to an outdated law intended to protect electronic privacy, a group of law enforcement officers is lobbying for a provision that would erode privacy by requiring that text messages be saved and stored for at least two years. According to CNET, police and prosecutors’ groups say they have increasingly come to rely on text messages as evidence in criminal cases, and they are vying for a mandated storage period for wireless providers in amendments to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act now being considered:

[T]he Senate Judiciary committee … approved sweeping amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act last week. Unlike earlier drafts, the latest one veers in a very privacy-protective direction by requiring police to obtain a warrant to read the contents of e-mail messages; the SMS push by law enforcement appears to be a way to make sure it includes one of their priorities too.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the law enforcement proposal is to store the contents of SMS messages, or only the metadata such as the sender and receiver phone numbers associated with the messages. Either way, it’s a heap of data: Forrester Research reports that more than 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the U.S. last year, over 6 billion SMS messages a day.

Among the groups urging the mandate are the Mayor Cities Police Chiefs Association, the National District Attorneys’ Association, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies. These agencies are not alone in vying for more data collection and retention. The Department of Justice last year called for laws requiring Internet providers to retain data. But the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Calabrese points out that any such proposal certainly doesn’t belong in discussions on reform of the law intended to protect electronic privacy.

Evidence suggests that wireless carriers have a range of evolving policies on retaining text messages, from no retention at all to 180 days. Most companies, however, appear not to have policies that messages be stored for a time period even close to two years. A spokesman for U.S. Cellular told CNET that data is stored for just 3-5 days, due to the volume of the content.

Both wireless companies and law enforcement agencies do increasingly store and monitor other kinds of phone data. The New York City Police Department is retaining cell phone logs collected when phones are reported stolen, and other wireless carriers recently reported fielding 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for various types of data.

Last year, Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) was one of the leading proponents of a plan to rig the Electoral College for Mitt Romney by allocating the state’s electoral votes by congressional district rather than awarding them to the overall winner of the state. Had Pileggi’s election-rigging proposal been in effect last month, Romney would have likely received 13 of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, despite losing the state by more than 5 percentage points. The election rigging plan eventually died, however, due to concerns from House Republicans that it might cause the Obama campaign to shift resources to their districts and cost them their seats.

Pileggi is not giving up, however, and he’s now backing a slightly modified scheme to rig the 2016 election for Republicans:

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi says frustrated Pennsylvania supporters of Mitt Romney deserve a more equitable way of counting presidential votes. He’s pushing once again to break up the state’s electoral college vote.

But instead of determining the votes by congressional district, they would be allocated according to percentage of the popular vote, plus two for the statewide winner. . . . Under that system, Barack Obama would have won 12 of Pa.’s electoral college votes and 8 for Romney. That’s a net advantage of 4 EC votes for Obama versus the net 20 advantage Pa. gave him on election day.

The reason for this proposal is clear. Pennsylvania is a blue state that voted for the Democratic candidate in every single presidential race for the last two decades. So Pileggi’s plan is nothing more than a proposal to steal electoral votes that are overwhelmingly likely to be awarded to the Democratic candidate under the current system and give them away to the Republican candidate.

In response to a resolution from Latin American countries lamenting the failure of the drug war, the United Nations General Assembly voted last week to reconsider the international approach to drug policy during a special session.

In proposing the summit to the UN in September, then-Mexican President Felipe Calderon (who left office Dec. 1) questioned the U.S.-led war on drugs, and said the UN should lead a debate over a “less prohibitionist” approach. Last year he suggested that countries should consider drug legalization among the possible alternatives. Calderon made clear, however, that they “won’t cede an inch” in cracking down on gangs.

Columbian President Juan Manuel Santos said during the meeting that it is the UN’s duty to “determine – on an objective scientific basis – if we are doing the best we can or if there are better options to combat this scourge.” He also said that Colombia would be open to legalization if other countries were to also do so, and Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina has outright endorsed legalization in the past. Reuters reported in September:

Mexico and Colombia are two of Washington’s firmest allies in Latin America and both work closely with U.S. anti-drug efforts. While the subject of legalization was discussed at an Americas-wide summit in Colombia attended by U.S. President Barack Obama earlier this year, raising the once-taboo subject at the 193-nation meeting in New York amounts to an escalation of the debate.

At the time of this initial proposal, Reuters reported that Obama “ruled out any major changes on drug laws,” but that was before two U.S. states passed ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate marijuana like alcohol – prompting global discussion about how these state laws will change drug policy, and a warning statement from the the head of a UN drug agency that the United States will be violating international drug treaties.

Obama has not provided any public response to the passage of the two state laws, and both the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration have largely hedged in revealing how they plan to respond to the laws’ implementation, saying only that federal enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act “remains unchanged.” The laws have also prompted several members of Congress to propose an amendment to the Controlled Substances Act that would exempt those states that have passed laws from the act’s marijuana provisions. Other members of Congress have simply asked the federal government not to prosecute those in compliance with the new state marijuana laws – an approach they have rejected with respect to medical marijuana dispensaries in states where they are legal.

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has also expressed a desire to move “beyond the drug war” and says he plans to focus more on reducing violence.

Despite initially saying that it would not target medical marijuana dispensaries in compliance with state law, the Obama Administration backed away from this view in 2011, and federal prosecutors in California are now targeting the nation’s largest dispensary. Harborside Health Center serves more than 100,000 patients and was recently praised by Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker for providing “access to safe, affordable and effective medicine.”

Last summer, federal prosecutors filed a lawsuit seeking to seize the property that houses Harborside’s two locations. In response to this action, one of Harborside’s landlords asked a state court to evict Harborside, hoping that such an eviction would get the feds to back off. In an opinion handed down last week, a California trial court rejected this attempt to evict the dispensary.

The court’s order will likely only provide small comfort to Harborside and to the dispensary’s thousands of patients, as federal prosecutors remain free to go after marijuana dispensaries in federal court. Nevertheless, the state court’s order draws a clear line against federal efforts to push California to take action against dispensaries operating entirely in compliance with state law:

The court concludes, as a matter of law, that a landlord cannot rely on Section 1161(4) to ask a California state court to find a lease terminated . . . based solely on a tenant’s use of the premises to operate a medical marijuana dispensary if state law immunizes the tenant’s conduct in operating the dispensary from criminal prosecution under state controlled-substance laws and the landlord’s only basis for alleging that the tenant is using the property “for an unlawful purpose” . . . is a violation of federal controlled-substance laws. In such circumstances, a state court could not enjoin the tenant from using the property to operate a dispensary. To impose the harsher remedy of declaring a lease terminated and authorizing the sheriff to evict a tenant would be to improperly enforce federal criminal law . . . . The court does note, however, that the U.S. Attorney filed her forfeiture complaint in federal court — the appropriate organ to enforce federal criminal law.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, the federal government does have the constitutional authority to target marijuana, but it cannot force states to contribute to these efforts if they do not want to. If last week’s order is affirmed by higher California courts, it will go a long way towards establishing that federal officials are on their own when they go after dispensaries in compliance with state law.

The Times of London reports that several American churches are now offering concealed firearms training in order to attract worshipers to their pews. One of these churches, Heights Baptist in San Angelo, Texas offers a particularly unusual reason why they are now training their parishioners to pack heat — in order to prevent worship services from being disrupted by armed Mexicans:

In Texas, where it’s legal to carry guns into any church without a specific no-firearms policy, Heights Baptist in remote San Angelo began offering concealed carry classes in June. The class was a response to security concerns among congregants.

“We’re about 150 miles from the border with Mexico and we’re very unsure about our insecure borders — about what’s coming into our cities,” Pastor James Miller told NRA News. “Personally, I feel more secure that should our worship time be interrupted by a life-threatening intrusion, that we would at least stand some kind of a chance in stopping either a mass killing or terrorizing experience.”

Miller also claims there is a spiritual component to carrying a Glock hidden beneath your Sunday best: “Jesus advises his disciples to sell their cloak and buy a sword. He instructed his people to be prepared to defend themselves.”