Privacy advocates, tech companies nudge Congress to protect ‘abandoned’ e-mails

Ranging from Adobe to the ACLU, from Facebook to FreedomWorks, and from Twitter to the Taxpayers Protection, a coalition of more than 80 civil liberties groups and tech companies has sent a pair of letters to Congress meant to nudge the House and Senate into moving ahead with a vote on legislation that would require e-mails stored longer than six months to be accessed only by a warrant.

In the House, at least, the immediate goal of the letter is to prompt Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) into holding hearings, markups and, eventually, a floor vote on the E-mail Privacy Act (HR 1852). Why six months -- or, as the law has it, 180 days exactly? Because in olden times you would go and retrieve your e-mail from a third-party server, in much the same way that you might go and get your mail out of your mailbox. E-mail left on servers longer than that seemed, in a legal sense, unwanted and thus undeserving of strong privacy protections. A subpoena was enough.