Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the most prominent non-profit digital rights organizations, released a statement on their website, calling for support of the Email Privacy Act. The bill seeks to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), primarily by the requirement of a probable cause warrant for any governmental access to users’ online private messages.
This update points at the root of a matter lying at the heart of privacy advocates spearheaded by the EFF. The actual version of the ECPA allows government agencies to obtain private online messages, such as personal emails or social media messages, without a warrant, when they are older than 180 days. According to the EFF, “[t]he government would have to obtain a warrant if those same messages were printed out on your desk. This difference shouldn’t exist.”
When we covered the ECPA the last time, Tara touched on the White House’s call for a more invasive amendment of the law in 2010, seeking to authorize the FBI to obtain electronic records without a warrant. Though, after last year’s “Summer of Snowden”, momentum seems to be gained in favor of privacy and data protection, currently represented by the Email Privacy Act:
While The Hill reported on February 10, 2014, 24 co-sponsors of the Email Privacy Act, GovTrack.us counted today 181 co-sponsors.
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