CIO Dive: What happens when tech innovation moves faster than Congress?

CIO Dive: What happens when tech innovation moves faster than Congress? by Justine Brown:

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) has a provision that requires electronic communications more than 180 days old be treated as abandoned and thus obtainable with a subpoena (and its lower burden of proof) or court order rather than a warrant.

The problem is, the ECPA was enacted in October 1986. Clearly, ECPA was written for an earlier technological era.

“It’s easy to see that (ECPA) came from a time when email was an inchoate technology, server space was limited, and the world wide web—let alone web- and cloud-based email and messaging services—didn’t yet exist,” said Kyle Daly, senior reporter of Privacy & Data Security at Bloomberg Law.