Reason.com: Fourth Amendment Protections for Emails Inch Forward in Congress

Reason.com: Fourth Amendment Protections for Emails Inch Forward in Congress by Scott Shackford:

Legislation would require warrants for old communications.

There is a big, huge gap in your Fourth Amendment protection against government searches without a warrant that goes all the way back three decades. That’s when Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which like many laws, somehow managed to do the opposite of what it is named. This was not necessarily on purpose (for once), but rather a failure to predict how email and digital communications would ultimately become Americans’ primary method of talking to each other.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act treats all emails stored by a third party provider as “abandoned” after 180 days and allows for law enforcement agencies to gain access to the contents without having to get a warrant. At the time, third party providers weren’t actually storing emails for long periods. Now they are.