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
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