This is stunning. We've had to wait this long to address privacy issues around email? The world is changing, faster than ever! And Congress *needs* to step up the pace.
Two years ago, I wrote about a bipartisan effort (in which I was and still am participating) to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. That effort, sadly, went nowhere.
I am, however, happy to report that progress is being made to revive that effort in the 114th Congress. This year two separate but related bills are being considered in the House and Senate that bear on these issues.
One, the Leahy-Lee bill (Yoder-Polis in the House) addresses email privacy. The current structure of ECPA, which was adopted in 1986, stems from a time when nobody could imagine that anyone would ever store lots of data (like emails) for long periods of time — the expense was too great. So ECPA adopted an odd rule that communications stored for longer than 180 days would be accessible by law enforcement through a subpoena rather than by a warrant. This had the result of making long-term stored email less well protected than, say, diaries or letters or your telephone communications. Who knew that Gmail was in the future?...