The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is a federal law which was passed by Congress to allocate the offensive content over the Internet. The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires that K-12 schools and libraries in the United States use Internet filters and implement other measures to protect children from harmful online content as a condition for the receipt of certain federal funding. It was signed into law on December 21, 2000 and was found to be constitutional by the United States Supreme Court on June 23, 2003. CIPA obligates the schools and all public libraries to require filters on their computers to stop minors from accessing sites that are not appropriate. (Federal Communications Commission, n.d.) The (CIPA) was passed in December 2000. The main purpose of the CIPA is for the protection of children from obscene, child pornography and other dangers of the internet.
CIPA does not precisely state what kind of filtering systems to use. This is the third law that Congress has passed to allocate concerns about the children’s access to the inappropriate Internet sites and it is the only one “that the U.S. Supreme Court found constitutionally defensible.” (Minnesota House of Representatives House Research, 2004)
Our kids face online predators and other inappropriate things in chat rooms, online games, pictures of teens drinking, drugs, sexual messages, and even false information about them written online before they are eighteen. (Covenant Eyes, 2012)
Just about all households, schools, libraries, public places and even our workplace have a computer and access to the Internet. (Anti Essays, 2012) People are even using smartphones to access the Internet. The advanced technology has great prospects for the society but there are “new ethical and social issues for individuals.” (Anti Essays, 2012).
Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) (P. L. 99-508, 100 Stat.1848) was enacted to extend federal wiretap laws to new forms of communication. [ [ The prior law, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, protected only those communications that could be heard and understood by the human ear, such as telephone calls made over a public, wire-based system and private in person conversations overheard with a microphone from interception or disclosure by law enforcement or private individuals. It did not address new communication technologies such as email, computer data transmissions, faxes, pagers and cellular or cordless telephones. These new technologies created significant uncertainty about their privacy protections, and about any limits on law enforcement's right to gather and use these communications as evidence in a criminal prosecution. Congress also feared that, without clear privacy protections, the public would not use or accept these new technologies.
The ECPA also added new provisions prohibiting access to stored electronic communications, i.e., the Stored Communications Act,18 U.S.C. §§ 2701-12. The ECPA also included so-called pen/trap provisions that permit the tracing of telephone communications. §§ 3121-27. Later, the ECPA was amended, and weakened to some extent, by some provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. In addition, Section 2709 of the Act, which allowed the FBI to issue National Security Letters (NSLs) to Internet service providers (ISPs) ordering them to disclose records about their customers, was ruled unconstitutional under the First and Fourth Amendments in ACLU v. Ashcroft (2004). It is thought that this could be applied to other uses of National Security Letters. The (ECPA) has been met with criticism through the years including its failure to protect all communications and consumer records. Under the ECPA it is relatively easy for a governmental agency to demand service providers hand over consumer data that has been stored on servers.

References
Minnesota House of Representatives House Research, 2004
Covenant Eyes, 2012
Anti Essays, 2012
McClure, Charles R.; Paul T. Jaeger (2009). Public Libraries and Internet Service Roles: Measuring and Maximizing Internet Services.
FCC guide: Children's Internet Protection Act". Federal Communications Commission. Retrieved 2012-09-16.
Helft, Miguel and Claire Cain Miller, “News Analysis: 1986 Privacy Law Is Outrun by the Web”, The New York Times, January 9, 2011. Retrieved 2012-09-16.
Doug Stanglin (February 18, 2010). "School district accused of spying on kids via laptop webcams". USA Today. Retrieved September 16, 2012