In today’s Quick Hits, we share some privacy updates from Washington D.C. and a link to 20 of the worst things you could tweet.

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Justice Department Opposes Privacy Law Revision

In a report for CNET, Declan McCullogh writes that the U.S. Justice Department has come out against revising the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. According to the report, “James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, warned that rewriting [the law] to grant cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans’ cell phones would hinder police investigations.” The law, which was written well before the personal computing era, has been difficult for judges to interpret in the context of today’s technology.

Sen. Al Franken and Others Monitoring Epsilon Breach

In a statement, Sen. Al Franken, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s new privacy panel, spoke out about the recent Epsilon data breach saying “we need to give Americans more awareness about who has their information and greater ability to protect it.” Franken is one of many legislators interested in the Epsilon breach and its implications for personal privacy. According to Politico, Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Reps. Mary Bono Mack and G.K. Butterfield are also keeping tabs on the situation.

Terror Alert Warnings Coming to Facebook and Twitter

According to an AP report, the government is planning to use the popular social networking websites Facebook and Twitter to warn citizens about changes in the terrorism threat levels. Quoting the story, “The U.S. government’s new system to replace the five color-coded terror alerts will have two levels of warnings — elevated and imminent — that will be relayed to the public only under certain circumstances for limited periods of time, sometimes using Facebook and Twitter.” Before posting the warning to the social media sites, however, “federal, state and local government leaders will have already been notified.”

Facebook’s Messaging Overhaul is Complex

In a report for CNN, Mark Milian describes Facebook’s ongoing overhaul of its messaging system and why it is the company’s most complex project to date. According to the article, “in the time since cementing the concept and in the months since beginning the rollout with much fanfare, [Facebook's] engineers have run into some monumental hurdles.” Facebook is continuing to work on the project, but the company’s slow progress underlies just how big of a change this could be to Internet communications.

20 Terrible Tweets

We’ve come so far thanks to technology. With Twitter, it only takes 140 characters to ruin your reputation. In this interesting feature for the Telegraph, Matthew Moore highlights 20 of the worst ways to use Twitter and explains why each one is so terrible for your followers.