By Serrin Turner

Last week saw action on two fronts regarding the Stored Communications Act (SCA) – the US federal statute regulating government searches of online accounts in criminal investigations. In Congress, a proposal to reform the SCA advanced in the House; and in the courts, Microsoft sued to challenge a provision of the SCA as unconstitutional. Although the reform bill has been portrayed as a major piece of privacy legislation, the version now under consideration is quite modest and would not substantially change how the SCA is applied in practice. However, the Microsoft lawsuit, if successful, could significantly reshape and restrict how the SCA is used by law enforcement.

What is the Stored Communications Act?

The SCA sets forth the procedures by which US law enforcement authorities can compel electronic communications service providers to disclose the contents of (and other records pertaining to) user accounts. While the SCA is applied most often in the context of email accounts, it applies equally to social-networking accounts, cloud-storage accounts, web-hosting accounts, and any other type of account where a user may store electronic communications. Like everyone else, criminals are increasingly communicating over the Internet, and as a result the SCA is now routinely used by law enforcement to obtain the contents of online accounts used by criminal suspects to communicate and do business.