Crafty plan to give FBI warrantless access to browser histories axed

BY: 11 Jun 2016 at 00:19, Iain Thomson 
 
A sly attempt to grant the FBI warrantless access to people's browser histories in the US has been shot down by politicians.
Unfortunately, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) Amendments Act of 2015, which would have brought in some privacy safeguards for Americans, was cut down in the crossfire.
The ECPA Amendments Act is very simple: it amends the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which gives cops and agents warrantless access to any email that has been read or is more than 180 days old.
That 30-year-old act made sense back in the day of 20MB hard drives and when we stored own emails on our own computers: if we deleted something to save space or to simply destroy it, it was gone. But in today's cloudy world, where we have no real control over our information, it has proven a privacy nightmare. (By the way, the ECPA was used against Microsoft by the Feds in New York in 2014 to demand emails from a data center in Ireland.)
 
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