In the News

Imagine police rifling through your desk, then boxing up and carting off any mail or correspondence that was older than six months.

Ridiculous; they'd have to have a warrant. But the same Fourth Amendment protection you enjoy at home has yet to be extended to the emails and other electronic communications that you've sent or received and are stored on servers by Internet service providers and others. Currently, law enforcement can obtain emails that are more than 180 days old from service providers without a warrant and without notifying the targets of their investigations.

That could change following Wednesday's unanimous — that's 419 to 0 — vote in the U.S. House to pass the Email Privacy Act, which provides a long-needed overhaul of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, first passed in 1986 when email was mostly reserved for use by military personnel, government employees and academics, years before home dial-up modems and alerts of “You've got mail!”

The Email Privacy Act would extend warrant protection, requiring law enforcement, including civil enforcement agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Trade Commission and the Security and Exchange Commission, to obtain a court order before compelling service providers to provide the contents of customers' emails that have been stored on their servers.

Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Washington, who worked on mobile communication issues when she was at Microsoft, has pushed for modernization of the 1986 act since she was elected to represent the 1st District; she sponsored the act introduced by Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kansas.

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