Should the government need a warrant to read your emails? A majority of Americans think so.

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published 30 November 2015

When the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) passed in 1986, Congress figured Americans couldn't afford the digital storage to retain thousands upon thousands of emails, wrote the woman with 46,000 email conversations filling 16 GB of her Gmail account.

Thanks to the dated assumptions of the ECPA, the government isn't required to get a warrant to search emails more than six months old — but new poll results find Americans want Fourth Amendment protections for all their online communications. Some 77 percent of registered voters said a warrant should be required for law enforcement to view any "emails, photos and other private communications stored online," and 86 percent said the ECPA was due for an update after learning how it currently functions.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.