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Comment by slickdork | Hacker News Reader

Mildly related: In America, e-mails stored on a server for over 180 days are considered 'abandoned' and can be viewed by law enforcement without warrants. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv...

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The bill to fix this relic of a time where people stored emails in noticeably-finite inboxes, the Email Privacy Act, passed the House this session but got knocked out of the bill in the Senate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_Privacy_Act

How comes there are no ongoing protests? This is appalling.

I wonder the same thing. Civil Asset Forfeiture is at least as awful and should offend everyone regardless of their stance on current political hot topics. Yet it appears to go on unaddressed.

People can't protest what they don't know about, and this kind of thing isn't talked about at all.

I think for most people in the US, this wouldn't make their top 50 list of things wrong with the US, or our legal system in particular. And many of those people would probably read about this, shrug, and think "eh, nothing in my old emails that I care if the government sees".

It's actually super weird, because US culture has a strong component of distrust of government. But the government is pretty good at making people fear crime, terrorism, etc., which allows them to get the people to "trust" them with mass surveillance and other privacy invasions.

This explains the "179 day retention policy" that I've seen at several places.

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