The House voted unanimously, 419-0, this afternoon to update old tech federal technology laws to provide better privacy protections for Americans’ old emails from unwarranted government searches.

The Email Privacy Act, HB 699, updates the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to correct a significant gap in Fourth Amendment protections of citizens’ communications. The old law determined that emails or stored communications held by a third-party provider (like Google) were no longer subject to warrants in order for authorities to access their contents after 180 days. Law enforcement or investigatory agencies could just get subpoenas and go directly to the third-party storage systems to demand copies of the contents.

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