Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swartzchstraber, your host. On today's show, email privacy, is it finally happening? Will Congress finally protect the privacy of Americans' emails? Will law enforcement finally be required to get a warrant before accessing our cloud storage?

These sound like obvious things, but they've taken a really long time to come to be.

Joining me to discuss this is Big Brother and President of Tech Freedom, Baron Soka.

Baron, thank you for joining me.

I can't think of anything funny to say.

So, thanks for having me.

Well, after that awkward pause, let's get into the show.

We'll edit out the pause.

It'll sound totally natural.

So, Baron, what we're talking about today is something that we talked about on episode 15 of this podcast with Chris Calabrese of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

But there have finally been some actual developments in the longstanding development. with Chris Calabrese of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

But there have finally been some actual developments in the long-standing battle to protect the privacy of Americans' emails and other stored electronic communications.

But just to bring listeners up to speed who may not have heard episode 15, we're talking about the 1986 Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, and we're talking about reforming that law. What is it? And what's the problem with that law? Yeah. So,

if you store files on your computer, they're protected by the Fourth Amendment. The government

has to get a warrant if law enforcement wants to come in and read them.

So, in other words, the Fourth Amendment for constitutional purposes doesn't distinguish between technologies.

And that's exactly right.

It shouldn't matter whether it's paper or digital.

The problem is that if you store stuff on someone else's computer, which is essentially how most computing

today, if not all of the things that we do, work, that's not covered at all by the Fourth Amendment.

And that's because of Supreme Court decisions that go back to the 1960s and 70s.

And so in the 80s, recognizing that this was going to be a problem, Congress passed the law that you mentioned, ECPA, in order to deal with this. But of course, at the time, the internet was still a very niche thing that was being used, really only at universities. The thing that Congress contemplated was remote processing of data. So companies would put data on a tape

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