U.S. House of Representatives passes Email Privacy Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously on Wednesday about the Email Privacy Bill. The bill aims at updating the current Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) from 1986. Under the ECPA, U.S. Authorities can access email communications directly from service providers with just a subpoena, if data is more than 180 old. However, under the new Email Privacy Act, they will need furthermore a warrant to access emails or other electronic communications no matter how old they are.

Currently, access to electronic communications from U.S. authorities is being subject to debate at an international level. Specially, after some weeks ago the FBI requested Apple to develop a software that allows to extract data from an iPhone device that belonged to the San Bernardino terrorist.

The Email Privacy Bill will have to be voted by the Senate, but the position of the upper chamber towards the bill is still not clear.