A privacy bill five years in the making just passed overwhelmingly through the House of Representatives, where privacy advocates and tech companies like Google and Dropbox are challenging a decades-old law that allows the government to get emails without a warrant.
That law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, is coming up on its 30th anniversary, and it hasn’t aged well. ECPA allows warrantless searches of email and other communications stored by third party cloud providers. Basically, as long as the messages are considered “abandoned”—meaning they’re older than 180 days or have been opened—the Feds can force companies to hand them over without getting a warrant from a judge.
