Email privacy blitz unites Amazon, Grover Norquist

Major technology companies and advocacy groups are rushing to urge “speedy consideration” of legislation to add new legal protections to people’s e-mails.

Companies from Amazon to eBay to Facebook joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform and dozens of others in sending letters demanding Congress finalize a bill to require that officials get a warrant before searching people’s old e-mails or other items stored digitally on the cloud. "Because of all its benefits, there is an extraordinary consensus around ... reform -- one unmatched by any other technology and privacy issue,” they wrote in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Passing a bill “sends a powerful message -- Congress can act swiftly on crucial, widely supported, bipartisan legislation,” they wrote. “Failure to enact reform sends an equally powerful message -- that privacy protections are lacking in law enforcement access to user information and that constitutional values are imperiled in a digital world.”