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Email Privacy Act Cosponsored by Majority of House of Representatives; ARL Applauds Milestone in ECPA Reform

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ARL is pleased that on June 17, 2014, the Email Privacy Act, H.R. 1852, reached a milestone of 218 cosponsors, representing support from a majority of the members of the US House of Representatives.

The Email Privacy Act, originally introduced by Rep. Yoder (R-KS) on May 7, 2013, would update an outmoded law known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and ensure that important Fourth Amendment privacy protections extend to online communications. ECPA was enacted in 1986 and has not kept pace with evolving technologies. The law permits government agencies to access e-mails, documents, and other communications that are older than 180 days and stored online without obtaining a warrant, affording online communications less protection than hard-copy documents stored in a filing cabinet.

As libraries and universities move services into the cloud and more communications take place online, it is critical that the Fourth Amendment protect information long considered to be private—including what individuals are reading or researching, and to whom they are talking—even in the digital world. The growth of the Internet has launched new forms of communications and changed the way individuals interact since ECPA’s enactment in 1986. The Email Privacy Act would change the absurd results of ECPA and require agencies to obtain a warrant for content, thereby ensuring that Fourth Amendment protections extend to online documents and communications.

A majority of the House of Representatives clearly supports the restoration of these important privacy rights and ARL urges Congress to act quickly to pass the Email Privacy Act. There is no logical reason to grant greater privacy protection for hard-copy documents or traditional forms of communication than for documents stored in the cloud or e-mail and social media communications. The Email Privacy Act provides a practical solution to this absurdity.


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

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