Senate Resurrects Cloud Storage Protections Bill

A bipartisan bill, the ECPA Modernization Act, has been introduced that would update communications privacy law to protect cloud storage. It is the latest effort by the Senate to address the issue after the House voted overwhelmingly to protect older data. In the previous Congress, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) pulled an Electronic Communications Privacy Act update bill from the committee's markup agenda after "poison pill" amendments threatened to expand the bill into areas that neither of its co-sponsors wanted it to go. That baseline bill, which passed the House 419 to zero, would have updated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to provide protections for cloud storage by requiring a probable cause warrant for accessing information in the cloud and extending the protections to emails and other content stored over 180 days (currently no warrant is required to access those).