While a warrant requirement for e-mail is unlikely to be passed at the federal level anytime soon (despite yet another recently introduced bill), a California state senator wants his home state to do just that. If passed, the bill would extend significant digital privacy rights to the most populous state in America.

On Monday, Mark Leno, a state lawmaker who represents San Francisco, is set to introduce a new bill, called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA).

If passed, it would not just impose a warrant requirement to access e-mail, but would also require that law enforcement officials not interact with any electronic device in the possession of a citizen—to put the law in formal compliance with the unanimous 2014 Supreme Court decision Riley v. California, which required a warrant to search a cellphone.

"Californians lives are relying evermore on digital information and following the NSA debacle, more Californians recognize the risk to their privacy and their Fourth Amendment constitutional rights," Leno told Ars.

"Other states have moved ahead, bypassing California. Texas, Maine, Utah, are among 15 states that have put into law similar protections and the Supreme Court of the United States has urged state legislatures to update their warrant requirements for the digital age. This time, different from before, we have near universal support from the tech industry."

As the California bill states:

1546.1. Except as provided in this section, a government entity shall not do any of the following: (1) Compel the production of or access to electronic communication information from a service provider. (2) Compel the production of or access to electronic device information from any person or entity except the authorized possessor of the device. (3) Access electronic device information by means of physical interaction or electronic communication with the device, except with the specific consent of the authorized possessor of the device.

A “Golden State” of mind

The bill has a substantial amount of support from established tech companies and civil liberties groups, including Apple, Google, Facebook as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“At Adobe, we believe our customers’ private communications should receive full constitutional protections, regardless of whether these communications are stored at home, at work or in our cloud,” Mary Catherine Wirth, an Adobe Systems lawyer, said in a statement.

Legal experts say that CalECPA, if it passes, would not be the first such digital protection bill at the state level, but it would be the most comprehensive.

“In addition to providing warrant protection for the contents of electronic communications like emails and Facebook messages, it also requires law enforcement obtain a warrant to obtain location information and metadata,” Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars by e-mail.

“It also has reporting requirements to provide oversight and, I think most uniquely, gives California judges the discretion to appoint a special master to ensure an electronic search warrant is narrowed, as well as require information obtained by the warrant that is unrelated to the investigation be destroyed as soon as possible.”

Nicole Ozer, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, concurred with this sentiment.

“It's really important both for users and companies that there be rules that reflect the modern digital world and over the past few months many different companies have come together to draft CalECPA and hopefully it will be enacted in California and will serve as a model for other states to follow,” she told Ars.