House unanimously passes email privacy bill

WASHINGTON, April 27 (UPI) -- The House of Representatives on Wednesday unanimously passed an overhaul of a 30-year-old electronic privacy law that would prevent the government from reading Americans' old emails without a warrant.

In a 419-0 vote, House members showed a rare moment of bipartisanship to pass the Email Privacy Act, which requires government agents to have a warrant before searching a person's email or other electronic communications, even if the information is years old.

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, local, state and federal authorities can look at a person's email if it is at least six months old, though critics have derided as a violation of the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

"The last time we updated these laws, I was flipping burgers at McDonald's," said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. "So clearly this is long overdue. The principle here is important: our Fourth Amendment rights should apply to our emails. This bill does that without impeding law enforcement's ability to do its job."

The bill now goes to the Senate where its future is unknown and no similar bill has reached the floor.

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said before the vote, "there is a lot of interest in taking it up," but set no expectations beyond that.

There have been attempts to remove the loophole in the 30-year-old law since 2010, when an appeals court ruling challenged the law's constitutionality, and despite the Justice Department no longer using the law, tech companies have said they will not comply with it anyway.