Email Privacy Act

Key Points

• The bill closes a major loophole in current law that lets the government access emails older than 180 days without a warrant. Under current rules, law enforcement can use a simple subpoena for older stored communications. This bill requires a warrant from a judge for all stored emails and electronic communications, no matter how old they are.
• The bill expands protections beyond just email services to also cover remote computing services like cloud storage. This means your files stored with tech companies get the same legal protections as physical papers in your home.
• Tech companies would be allowed to tell their customers when the government requests their data, unless a court issues a specific delay order. This notice provision helps people stay informed about government access to their private information.
• The bill preserves law enforcement's ability to access certain types of communications without a warrant, such as publicly available advertisements and communications where the sender has given consent. It also does not limit Congress's own power to issue subpoenas.
• Introduced by Sens. Lee and Wyden, the bill is a bipartisan effort to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which was originally written in 1986 when email was a new technology and cloud storage did not exist.