Here’s how DOJ is threatening to scrap our online privacy rights

For those of us born in the 1990s, it is hard to imagine that people once lived without email and the internet. Rather than instantaneously sending a message to a colleague, people were stuck using the dreaded snail-mail services like USPS that take 3-5 days to deliver.

Now, not only do we expect instant communications, but we also assume that, like with snail mail, our emails are still private correspondence protected by the Fourth Amendment. However, a petition filed last week by the Department of Justice (DoJ) to re-open a 2014 case could change all that.

The case involves Microsoft’s supposed liability to turn over their data stored in Ireland to the U.S. government. This case has raised concerns regarding just how private our emails may or may not be.

The government claims that the 1986 Reagan-era Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), or more specifically the Title II Stored Communications Act — a Fourth Amendment loophole — obligates Microsoft to cough up the data.

ECPA circumvents the Constitution and Bill of Rights by allowing the government to seize all electronic communications that are more than 180 days old. But ECPA was enacted before personal communications were even in use, let alone the Cloud, so it does not accurately reflect the state of current technology.