Congress Wants a New Email Privacy Act—But the Next Attorney General Won’t
It’s safe to say that any digital privacy bill written more than three years before the invention of the World Wide Web is probably due for an overhaul. But the Electronic Communications Privacy Act has persisted intact for more than three decades, including its anachronistic loophole that allows the warrantless collection of emails from US citizens. Now, in its second attempt in two years, Congress is poised to reform the most outdated elements of ECPA. With Trump’s incoming Justice Department, that reform seems more urgent than ever.
On Monday evening, the House of Representatives will vote on—and is widely expected to pass—the Email Privacy Act, a bill that would reform ECPA. In particular, it would newly require government agencies to obtain a warrant before seizing a criminal suspect’s online communications that are more than 180 days old. Under the ECPA’s existing logic, those older communications are considered abandoned, and thus not subject to a reasonable expectation of privacy.
