Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century

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Congress is now set to clarify electronic privacy rules, bringing a quarter-century-old law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) in line with the Internet age.

On April 25, the Senate Judiciary Committee will start deliberating a measure that would require the government to get a search warrant, issued by a judge, to gain access to personal e-mails and all other electronic content held by a third-party service provider. The current statute requires a warrant for e-mails that are less than six months old. But it lets the authorities gain access to older communications — or bizarrely, e-mails that have already been opened — with just a subpoena and no judicial review. The law governs the privacy of practically everything entrusted to the Internet — family photos stored with a Web service, journal entries kept online, company documents uploaded to the cloud, and the flurry of e-mails exchanged every day. The problem is that it was written when the cloud was just vapor in the sky. Silicon Valley companies as well as advocacy groups from the political left and right have been lobbying for change for many years, and reform legislation seems to be gaining broad political support.


Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century Congress set to tackle email privacy (The Hill)