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.