US Senator Leahy proposes bill requiring warrants to search e-mails

[JURIST] US Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) [official website] introduced a bill [text, PDF] Tuesday amending the 25-year-old Electronic Communications and Privacy Act (EPCA) [text], which he authored, to require the government to obtain a warrant before searching private e-mails and other data stored on an Internet cloud. The bill removes the 180-day rule that only requires a warrant to search e-mails that are unopened and stored for less than 180 days. In 1986, e-mail was only stored on servers briefly…