Feb. 7 (UPI) — A bipartisan bill to update privacy laws was unanimously approved by the U.S. House of Representatives that would require law enforcement to get a warrant in order to review citizens’ email more than 180 days old — right now, they don’t need one.
The Email Privacy Act was approved by the House on Monday night and would replace the decades old Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which includes a loophole allowing law enforcement to gather older email without permission.
The update would require law enforcement to get a warrant before requesting email stored on a third- party server, updating the 30-year-old ECPA.
The old law was written and approved before the Internet was in common use, let alone the amount of data — not just email, but pictures, video and a plethora of other document types — that people now commonly store on third-party servers owned by thousands of companies.
The Obama administration habitually sought a warrant for email older than 180 days based on their own principle; however, the law was resubmitted and passed unanimously a second time because of relatively broad-based support for privacy and differences from one administration and Justice Department to another administration and Justice Department.
“We can send a strong message to the American people that their privacy matters,” Kansas Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder said on the House floor just before the bill sailed through the House.
The bill was unanimously passed by the House last year as well, but hit a brick wall in the Senate after Sens. Jeff Sessions and John Cornyn sought to add amendments that watered down the bill’s requirement.
Both senators added amendments about “emergency” situations where law enforcement could demand data without a warrant and allow national security agencies to collect other types of data without a warrant as well, resulting in the bill expiring before receiving a vote.
“I hope they’ve abandoned their tactics of trying to create a surveillance bill out of a privacy bill,” Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute, said of Sessions, Cornyn and other senators. “It’s critically important to recognize this is something both members of Congress and the American public are demanding.”
