(Photo: Comcast)

What's in your inbox? Some risque dirty talk? Maybe a handful of regretful messages about how hammered you were last night? If a law enforcement-backed proposal going before a House subcommittee today gets passed, wireless companies will be one step closer to having to store all of your text messages, sexy or not.

The bill is backed by law enforcement agencies, which argue that text messages can serve as key pieces of evidence in cases, particularly related to "domestic violence, stalking, menacing, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking." Cops want wireless companies to store your text messages so that they can have access to them in the event that any crime occurs. This is similar to a wireless provider recording phone calls and storing the audio files.

The House is working to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and today's hearing will focus on whether or not a bill like this one should be tacked on to the act. The Justice Department itself requested yesterday that any update to the ECPA allows the government access to Facebook messages and Twitter DMs.

How long before they're subpoenaing Snapchats?

Sen. Patrick Leahy (leahy.senate.gov)

On Thursday the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), sponsored by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, was unanimously passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The ECPA has actually been around since 1986; the new version has been updated for the 21st Century. Now law enforcement will be required to have a search warrant if they want a peek at emails, private messages and data that's been uploaded to the cloud.

As The Next Web reports, the ACLU is pretty happy the new version of the act has come this far:

“This is an important gain for privacy,” Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the ACLU, said in a statement. “We are very happy that the committee voted that all electronic content like emails, photos and other communications held by companies like Google and Facebook should be protected with a search warrant. We believe law enforcement should use the same standard to search your inbox that they do to search your home.”

We've embedded Senator Leahy's version of the ECPA below. The ACLU may be pleased with it, but there are still elements in the new legislation that may give privacy activists pause, like provisions on page 12 that allow "emergency acquisition" of electronic data without a warrant for several reasons, including "an immediate threat to national security."

Some in law enforcement could use the term "immediate threat" as a pretty broad brush.

Passage through a Senate committee is just one positive step ahead for the revised ECPA--the legislation still must go through the rest of the Senate as well as the House, and could see a good deal of revision along the way.

(Photo: ZDNet)

Gchat can be a welcome haven from the turmoil of the work day, a blinking beacon that serves as an important reminder of your humanity. And yet, the things you've typed into that little chat box without clicking the "off the record" button--the fights and breakups and conversations that basically amount to cybering? And all those emails you sent in college with thinly veiled references to drugs? It'd be embarrassing for anyone to read all that, let alone the Po Po.

Luckily for us, cops may finally need a warrant to dig into your inbox. Phew.

According to Ars Technica, a new bill that will be introduced into the Senate Judiciary Committee today would require a probable-cause warrant to access Gmail. Currently, because Gmail is stored on a remote server and not directly on a person's personal computer, law enforcement doesn't need a warrant to access it the same way they do to read your hard drive. They only require consent from the email service, Google. If it passes, this bill would make it much more difficult for cops to read through (and probably laugh at) your emails.

Writes Ars:

When Congress passed the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a time when massive online storage of e-mail was essentially unimaginable, it was presumed that if you hadn’t actually bothered to download your e-mail, it could be considered "abandoned" after 180 days. By that logic, law enforcement would not need a warrant to go to the e-mail provider or ISP to get the messages that are older than 180 days....

If this [new] bill does pass, it would instantaneously provide significantly more privacy to everyone in America who sends e-mail, uses Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, or communicates online in essentially any way.

If passed, the bill would be a win for privacy hawks everywhere. As an added bonus, it could save you the embarrassment of having to explain to cops why you sign all your emails "YOLO."