Senate Judiciary Committee to vote on email privacy bill

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a markup on Nov. 29 of legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before reading people's emails, Facebook messages or other forms of electronic communication.

Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) added the warrant requirement to H.R. 2471, a House bill that would loosen video privacy regulations. Chairman Leahy argues that the warrant requirement is necessary to ensure that federal privacy laws keep pace with advances in technology. Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, police only need an administrative subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old. Police simply swear an email is relevant to an investigation, and then obtain a subpoena to force an Internet company to turn it over. When lawmakers passed the ECPA more than 25 years ago, they failed to anticipate that email providers would offer massive online storage. They assumed that if a person hadn't downloaded and deleted an email within six months, it could be considered abandoned and wouldn't require strict privacy protections. Civil liberties groups say ECPA is woefully out of date in an era when deleting emails is no longer necessary.