How hard should it be for the government to read your e-mail?

In 1986, it would have been strange to keep an email for longer than six months. First of all, not that many people -- 10 million, maybe, compared to hundreds of millions today -- had email accounts. And for those that did, keeping email that long would have been a luxury, an egregious use of limited storage space. Service providers didn’t have space to keep back-ups of old emails on their servers: They deleted them. That was the world in which Congress first legislated what access law enforcement could have to email and other electronic communications, when it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

And in that world, it seemed perfectly reasonable to give fresh e-mails -- communications younger than 180 days -- strong legal protections, while worrying less about emails that hung around for longer than six months. The result is that, under current law, government officials don’t need a warrant to get access to all those old emails you’ve archived, ignored, deleted, or let hang out forever in your inbox. And if they subpoena your email, they can get all of them -- not just the ones that might be relevant to their investigation. Civil liberties and Internet privacy advocates have been pushing for years to reform ECPA, the bill that covers all this access, which was last updated in the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act.