The law, written in 1986, was meant to set warrant rules around government agencies’ access to personal data in the cloud. Debate on the issue is taking center stage in Washington after gaining attention in 2015, and reform legislation is now making its way through Congress.
The current ECPA allows government agencies to force internet companies and network providers to hand over the content of e-mail communications, without a warrant in some cases. That is mainly because the law is too old to have explicitly laid out warrant rules for 21st century cloud technology.
One of the circumstances in which law enforcement can currently exploit vagaries in the ECPA is to obtain access to data owned by a foreign citizen without a warrant. The Department of Justice, for example, can claim that right when the data is stored in the servers of an American company, regardless of data privacy rights granted the citizen by his own country’s laws.
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