Google to Congress: Reform Email Privacy Law Now

Google has a message for lawmakers on Capitol Hill: It's time to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a decades-old law that governs email privacy.
Richard Salgado, Google's Legal Director of Law Enforcement and Information Security, will testify before the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday in favor of updating ECPA. The law, first written in 1986, in part allows police to access citizens' emails older than 180 days with only a subpoena, which is easier to get than a search warrant.
Google and other email providers have for some time required a search warrant before handing over users' emails to law enforcement, a higher standard than what's called for by ECPA. That legal tension has yet to be tested by the Supreme Court, while changes to ECPA could remove the dissonance entirely.
Salgado's Congressional testimony comes in two parts: First, he believes a change is needed to protect Google users' privacy. Second, he believes an ECPA amendment could add clarity and remove legal confusion he argues impedes economic growth and innovation.
"ECPA worked well for many years, and much of it remains vibrant and relevant," Salgado wrote in prepared statements posted to Google's Public Policy Blog. "In significant places, however, a large gap has grown between the technological assumptions made in ECPA and the reality of how the Internet works today. This leaves us, in some circumstances, with complex and baffling rules that are both difficult to explain to users and difficult to apply."
Salgado goes on to highlight the differing interpretations of ECPA among law enforcement, the courts and businesses. The Department of Justice has argued it's fine for police to compel a provider to hand over users' emails older than 180 days with just a subpoena (and younger emails if the recipient has already opened them), while the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has "rejected this view," he writes.
Additionally, Salgado points out the Sixth Circuit found in 2010 that ECPA violates Americans' Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures — a position with which Google and other email providers have previously agreed.
"The inconsistent, confusing, and uncertain standards that currently exist under ECPA illustrate how the law fails to preserve the reasonable privacy expectations of Americans today," writes Selgado, before shifting from a privacy argument to one of economic growth.
"Moreover, providers, judges, and law enforcement alike have difficulty understanding and applying the law to today’s technology and business practices. By creating inconsistent privacy protection for users of cloud services and inefficient Ebook Converter, confusing compliance hurdles for service providers, ECPA has created an unnecessary disincentive to move to a more efficient, more productive method of computing. ECPA must be updated to help encourage the continued growth of the cloud and our economy."
Do you think police should need a warrant before reading your emails? How should the ECPA be reformed, if at all? Share your thoughts in the comments.