• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, May 4, 2016

Last week, after years of delays and false starts, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that would require law enforcement officials to obtain warrants before accessing all emails and documents stored in the cloud.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act currently requires law enforcement authorities to get a search warrant before accessing material that is less than six months old, but not emails that are older. For those, the authorities only need a subpoena.

That's important because subpoenas are far easier to obtain than search warrants. Officials typically can get subpoena by showing that an email account might contain information that is “relevant” to an investigation -- a relatively lax standard. But search warrants can only be obtained if a judge thinks there is probable cause to believe that the material sought will yield evidence of a crime.

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation supports the new email privacy bill, but points out that it would be stronger if it also required the government to notify people when it sought warrants for their messages.

Not surprisingly, some government officials are pushing back against the bill. The Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly says that obtaining warrants for emails will make it harder to investigate. The agency wants the bill to contain an exception for civil law enforcement agencies, Politico writes today.

It's worth noting, however, that the measure wouldn't make it impossible for the SEC or other agencies to gather evidence; the House bill only requires them to show they have grounds for a search warrant.

Digital rights advocates, along with Web companies that host digital files, have long pushed to revise the current electronic privacy law. They rightly say that differentiating between documents based on how long they have been stored doesn't make sense today, given that companies like Google now allow people to keep old files in the cloud indefinitely.

The trade group Direct Marketing Association agrees, arguing that grounds that protecting emails from government surveillance will help preserve the so-called “data-driven economy.”

While debate about the issue has been percolating, at least one federal court has ruled that ECPA is unconstitutional. In that case, the the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2010 that the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement authorities to obtain search warrants to access people's emails.