Debate is currently underway in the US to bring the country’s electronic communication privacy laws into the 21st century.
The proposed changes have bipartisan support and include requiring the government to obtain a warrant before they can request email and other data stored in the cloud from internet and other online service providers.
The current Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which is almost 30 years old, only requires police to obtain a subpoena – without a judge’s approval – to search opened emails or emails more than 180 days old, which are then considered abandoned. When the ECPA was originally passed in 1986, the huge growth in online storage that exists today wasn’t forecast. The now-outdated ECPA operates on the premise that emails are stored on personal or work computers and were only stored on a third party server just long enough to transfer to the receiver’s email client. As things currently stand, a US citizen has more rights to privacy with postal mail and phone calls than online communications.
Google’s director of law enforcement and information security Richard Salgado has welcomed the ECPA review, saying the lag in the law has had a negative impact on the adoption of email and other cloud services.
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