A new bill if passed means police will need a warrant to read Americans emails.
Right now, if the police want to read my e-mail, it’s pretty trivial for them to do so. All they have to do is ask my online e-mail provider. But a new bill set to be introduced Thursday in the Senate Judiciary Committee by its chair, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), seems to stand the best chance of finally changing that situation and giving e-mail stored on remote servers the same privacy protections as e-mail stored on one's home computer.
When Congress passed the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a time when massive online storage of e-mail was essentially unimaginable, it was presumed that if you hadn’t actually bothered to download your e-mail, it could be considered "abandoned" after 180 days. By that logic, law enforcement would not need a warrant to go to the e-mail provider or ISP to get the messages that are older than 180 days; police only need to show that they have "reasonable grounds to believe" the information gathered would be useful in an investigation. Many Americans and legal scholars have found this standard, in today’s world, problematic.
Leahy, who was one of ECPA’s original authors, proposed similar changes in May 2011, but that was never even brought to a vote in the committee. The new version, which keeps the most important element of the 2011 proposal, will be incorporated into a larger bill aimed at revising the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).
"The ECPA fix would be a major step forward for e-mail privacy," wrote Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the EFF, in an e-mail to Ars.
On Wednesday, members of the Judiciary Committee received copies of two letters from prominent former government officials: former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) and Marc J. Zwillinger, who spent three years prosecuting cybercrime from the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. Barr is also a former federal prosecutor and Zwilinger is now in private practice and also teaches law at Georgetown University.
In a further bid to potentially assuage conservative committee members, Zwilinger also points out that the new amendment would "leave in place lower legal standards for the building blocks of law enforcement investigations."
Such information could include name, address, e-mail address, IP addresses, and other transactional data such as when, where, with whom and for how long someone communicated.
"This is the type of information that prosecutors use to build probable cause that enables them to seek court-ordered access to more sensitive information, such as communications content," Zwilinger wrote.
Ars e-mailed staffers of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee’s ranking Republican, to see what the senator thought of the Leahy amendment—as of press time they had not responded.
"E-mail and its eventual successors are simply too important to be governed by inconsistent and confusing standards," wrote Woodrow Hartzog, a professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, in an e-mail sent to Ars. "While more comprehensive and adaptable privacy protections for electronic communications are needed, I imagine dramatic improvement in the electronic surveillance regime will be politically and logistically challenging."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/cops-might-finally-need-a-warrant-to-read-your-gmail/