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If the police want to read copies of a snail-mail letter you've received, they generally need to get a warrant. But the situation is different for e-mail.

Under the terms of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, e-mail older than six months is considered abandoned. Authorities can obtain copies of it with no judicial oversight. When Congress established this rule, modern cloud e-mail services were still far in the future. Network storage was expensive, so it was assumed that users would delete messages from servers after reading them. Today, of course, people routinely leave years’ worth of e-mail sitting on the servers of webmail providers, making them vulnerable to government snooping. The need for reform has been obvious for years, but recent events have created a greater sense of urgency. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will meet to markup a bill to reform ECPA. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on e-mail privacy last month.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings laid out an ambitious plan for Netflix’s future in a paper published on the company’s investor relations site that paints Netflix as one of the driving forces behind a transition from linear television to a world of internet-delivered on-demand content.

The paper repeated some key points Hastings has made it the past, but also included a number of noteworthy new insights, including some data points on how Netflix spends its money. Notably, Hastings said that Netflix is now spending over $2 billion a year on the licensing and creation of content. The company is spending another $350 million a year on improving its service and apps, including improvements to the streaming quality and customer service. And it is spending over $450 million per year on marketing in all of its markets around the world.

[Commentary] Apparently, the Koch brothers are considering buying the Tribune network of newspapers in a bid to establish a pro-business conservative media chain. I say, good luck with that.

There are several reasons regional newspapers are an awkward fit for anyone looking to counter-program what they see as liberal bias in the news media. The main reason is that all major U.S. newspapers are based in cities. Cities in America are in the main run by Democrats, because they are populated, by and large, with Democrats, and very often also surrounded by Democratic suburbs. And because cities are run by Democrats, and populated by not only by Democrats but, very often, by liberal, minority, and immigrant Democrats, they tend to have laws on the books that at least formally signal a desire to serve the interests of these voting groups -- their residents, let's call them. The Koch brothers could try to make the Los Angeles Times or the Baltimore Sun more appealing to a different intellectual community. But if they were to buy the papers and push their newsrooms in a more conservative direction, I suspect they would see an increase in the pace at which the geographic communities that once sustained the publications abandon them.

In the four months since the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, the tone of the conversation about gun control on Twitter has shifted sharply several times in apparent response to ongoing events, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of nearly 21 million tweets from December 18 through April 21.

In that period, the Twitter sentiment overall was almost balanced between those supporting stronger gun control measures (42% of the conversation) and those opposed (38%), according to the report. That is in contrast to the first three days after the December 14 attack when an earlier Pew Research report found that pro-gun control voices dominated their opponents 64% to 21%. But what stands out even more is the fluid nature of the debate on Twitter. In 10 of the 18 weeks studied, assertions favoring tougher regulations outnumbered those opposing; in seven of those weeks, the sentiment against a new law was more prominent. In one of those weeks, the mix was exactly even. The findings also suggest that while pro-gun control forces dominated in the emotional and painful hours immediately following the attack, over time the conversation shifted to reflect the nation's more divided view of gun control that has become evident in recent years. At the same time, one of the biggest shifts in Twitter opinion occurred the week of the April 17 Senate vote, when sentiment favoring tougher gun laws outstripped expressions of opposition by 3-1.