House Votes Unanimously In Favor Of Requiring A Warrant To Search Emails

from the yay! dept

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The push to reform ECPA -- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- have been going on basically as long as this site has been in existence (i.e. nearly 20 years). There are lots of problems with ECPA, but the big one that everyone points to is that it considers any communication that's on a server more than 180 days to be "abandoned" and accessible without a warrant. That perhaps made some amount of sense back in 1986 when the law was written, because everything was client-server and you downloaded your emailthe server. But in an age of cloud computing and webmail it makes no sense at all. Still, the IRS and the SEC really, really liked the ability to use ECPA to snoop on people's emails.In the past few years, Congress has kept supporting reform, but it always dies when some part of the administration complains and tries to block it. And yet, each time it enters Congress, it gets more and more sponsors. And, finally, the full House has voted to pass the Email Privacy Act . It was no surprise that it passed. The bill had an astounding 315 cosponsors . Seriously:Still, it's impressive that the bill ended up passing, 419 votes to 0 (and 14 missing votes). On an issue like this, that's surprising. You figured there would beCongressional rep from somewhere arguing that this would let terrorists and child predators off the hook or something.The bill is certainly not perfect , and could be improved, but it's nice to see the House get the basics right. Now, we wait and see what happens in the Senate... Will the Senate ignore a unanimous House and let this bill just die, or will it finally do the right thing and protect email privacy?

Filed Under: 4th amendment, congress, ecpa, ecpa reform, email, house, kevin yoder, privacy, warrant