The Senate has advanced legislation that would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant from a judge before they could access someone’s email or other data stored in the cloud.
Currently, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), law enforcement agencies can subpoena any email that’s been opened by a recipient or that’s more than 180 days old; no warrant — and accompanying requirement to first demonstrate probable cause — required.
But the Leahy-Lee ECPA Amendments Act, approved Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would prohibit warrantless access to stored, online communications. “The bill would require law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant in order to gain access to the contents of email and of documents, pictures and other information stored in the cloud,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the civil rights group Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), in a blog post.