• The Hill, Thursday, November 15, 2012 5:07 PM

Later this month the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on a revision to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, the result of which would afford more privacy protection to personal emails. Under the current law police only need an administrative subpoena signed with a judge's approval to read emails that have been opened or are more than 180 days old. To obtain the subpoena, the police officer only needs to swear that the contents of an email are relevant to the investigation. When the law was passed in 1986, however, there was no anticipation of the massive online storage that email providers now offer, effectlvely eliminating the need to ever delete an email. 

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