E-mail privacy bill gets long-awaited hearing

An e-mail privacy bill with more than 300 cosponsors will get a hearing in the lower chamber on Dec 1, but plans for a markup or vote on the legislation are still unclear. The House Judiciary Committee appears poised to cover much of the same ground as its Senate counterpart did during a hearing in September, when many of the same witnesses testified.

The E-mail Privacy Act -- led by Reps Kevin Yoder (R-KS) and Jared Polis (D-CO) -- has failed to move in the past two and a half years despite having support from a supermajority of the chamber. Supporters have opted against attempting to force a vote through a discharge petition. The legislation would close a loophole in the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that lets the government use a subpoena, rather than a warrant, to force companies such as Google and other service providers to hand over customers' electronic communications if they are more than 180 days old. The provision is a holdover from an era in which it would have been largely impractical for an e-mail service provider to store e-mails for more than six months and cloud storage was not yet available.