<\/p>\n
Leahy\u2019s bill would amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Adopted when CompuServe was king, ECPA allows the government to acquire a suspect\u2019s e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed, as long as the content had been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more.<\/p>\n
EPCA, whose main sponsor 25 years ago was Leahy, was adopted at a time when e-mail, for example, wasn\u2019t stored on servers for a long time. Instead it was held there briefly on its way to the recipient\u2019s inbox. E-mail more than 6 months old was assumed abandoned, and that\u2019s why the law allowed the government to get it. At the time there wasn\u2019t much of any e-mail to get because a consumer\u2019s hard drive \u2014 not the cloud \u2014 was their inbox.<\/p>\n
But technology has evolved, and e-mail often remains stored on cloud servers indefinitely, in gigabytes upon gigabytes \u2014 meaning the authorities may access it without warrants if it\u2019s older than six months.<\/p>\n
The same rule also applies to content stored in the cloud. That includes files saved in DropBox, communications in Facebook, and Google Docs cloud-storage accounts. Such personal storage capabilities were nearly inconceivable when President Ronald Reagan signed the bill.<\/p>\n