It was nice to open the New York Times on Friday to read this article on privacy protection in the Technology section.  It picks up a number of the key points Chris Soghoian made in his excellent blog on the ACLU Blog of Rights.

For instance:

E-mail providers like Google and Yahoo keep login records, which reveal I.P. addresses, for 18 months, during which they can easily be subpoenaed.  The Fourth Amendment requires the authorities to get a warrant from a judge to search physical property.  Rules governing e-mail searches are far more lax: Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a warrant is not required for e-mails six months old or older. Even if e-mails are more recent, the federal government needs a search warrant only for “unopened” e-mail, according to the Department of Justice’s manual for electronic searches. The rest requires only a subpoena.  Google reported that United States law enforcement agencies requested data for 16,281 accounts from January to June of this year, and it complied in 90 percent of cases.


1986? Yes, you read that correctly.  The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act has not been updated for over 25 years.  So basically, our primary means of correspondence is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

About time to modernize the EPCA don't you think?  You can help by asking Congress to update EPCA today.