Proposals to end warrantless e-mail searches gain momentum in Congress

If the police want to read copies of a snail-mail letter you've received, they generally need to get a warrant. But the situation is different for e-mail.

Under the terms of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, e-mail older than six months is considered abandoned. Authorities can obtain copies of it with no judicial oversight. When Congress established this rule, modern cloud e-mail services were still far in the future. Network storage was expensive, so it was assumed that users would delete messages from servers after reading them. Today, of course, people routinely leave years’ worth of e-mail sitting on the servers of webmail providers, making them vulnerable to government snooping. The need for reform has been obvious for years, but recent events have created a greater sense of urgency. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will meet to markup a bill to reform ECPA. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on e-mail privacy last month.