Current federal law on regarding electronic and digital privacy is contradictory, aribitrary, unconstituitional and in need of a drastic overhaul. The DMCA and the Patriot Act are the worst culprits:

consumers' cable-television records enjoy more legal protection than just about any other sort of electronic media or communications records: more than satellite-television records, more than Internet logs, more than telephone records. The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 said that before the government could obtain cable television records, it had to go to court to show "clear and convincing evidence" that the subject of the request was reasonably suspected of criminal activity. Moreover, the customer was entitled to a hearing to contest the disclosure.

....The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 says that copyright holders may issue subpoenas signed only by a court clerk - not a judge - that require Internet providers to turn over personal information about their subscribers. The law does not require the subscribers to be notified. Every major Internet provider except SBC has complied with the record industry's requests.

Between the stringent provisions of the cable law and the relatively wide-open provisions of the digital copyright act, a crazy quilt of laws - a product of decades of ad hoc legislation - govern what your phone company, cable company, Internet service provider or video store may be compelled to tell about you.

....For instance, federal law says law enforcement agencies may monitor the phone numbers a citizen is dialing, as they are being dialed, after certifying only that the information is "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." Under that provision, the person under surveillance need not even be the person suspected of breaking the law. Generally the subject of that surveillance is not notified of the government's action.

By contrast, a separate law says that even when law enforcement agencies obtain a court order to gain access to a consumer's video rental records, the consumer must be notified before those records are turned over.

....For 30 years after the passage of the 1968 wiretap act, the basic framework for privacy in communications and media remained intact even as new laws established different legal privacy frameworks for national security investigations in 1978 and for the cable television industry in 1984. The basic principles of the 1968 wiretap system were extended to electronic data communications in 1986. The furor over the disclosure of Judge Robert Bork's video-rental history prompted a separate law for video-rental records in 1988.

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