Email Privacy Act: Congress Passes Bill That Requires Law Enforcement To Get Warrant To Retrieve Emails

Late on Monday, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before attempting to access a person’s emails and information stored on tech company servers.

The Email Privacy Act of 2017, an update to the three decades-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that first passed in 1986, passed the House by voice vote. The measure passed by the Congress would change the existing law that requires only a subpoena for authorities to access digital communications that are at least 180 days old and housed on remote servers.

Under the updated law, agencies like the Justice Department would have to apply for a warrant before retrieving any data from a service provider. This places a bigger legal burden on law enforcement by requiring more judicial oversight.

The decision was backed by a number of technology companies and consumer advocacy groups. A joint letter from a collective of more than 60 such organizations expressing support for the Email Privacy Act included signatories such as Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a blog post, Google director of law enforcement and information security Richard Salgado wrote the bill will “fix a constitutional flaw” in the ECPA and “ensures that the content of our emails are protected in the same way that the Fourth Amendment protects the items we store in our homes.”

The Software Alliance —a trade organization that represents some of the world's largest software makers including Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Adobe—also issued its support for the bill.

Craig Albright, the vice president of legislative strategy at the Software Alliance, told International Business Times the bill was a necessary update to an outdated law that was written before cloud services and most text communications were widely adopted.

He expressed hope the bill would be followed by more steps to modernize the existing law, noting there are still issues with how the bill might be applied internationally. “Law enforcement agencies [from different governments] need to cooperate and the law doesn’t speak to how that should be done in certain cases.”

Additional details may shake out through cases currently in court, Albright said, but noted any decisions handed down by the judicial system “won’t provide a satisfying answer” as to how future situations will be handled and said, “regardless of how the cases turn out, the law has to be updated.”

This is not the first time the Congress has passed the Email Privacy Act. An identical version of the bill made it through the House last year by a vote of 419-0.

In the Senate, the bill had 30 sponsors in 2016 with supporters on both sides of the aisle. However the bill got hung up by attempts to amend the bill, including an effort by Jeff Sessions—who was tapped by President Donald Trump to serve as U.S. attorney general—to grant law enforcement the ability to demand data without a warrant in “emergency cases.” The bill eventually expired before receiving a vote.

“What’s great about what happened in the House...they passed it really early in the session,” Albright said. He said that would provide more time for the Senate to work the bill into law.