ECPA was an amendment to Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (the Wiretap Statute), which was primarily designed to prevent unauthorized government access to private electronic communications.

[1] "Electronic communications" means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptic system that affects interstate or foreign commerce, but excludes the following:[2] Title I of the ECPA protects wire, oral, and electronic communications while in transit.

Title III prohibits the use of pen register and/or trap and trace devices to record dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information used in the process of transmitting wire or electronic communications without a court order.

[4] The ECPA extended government restrictions on wire taps from telephone calls to include transmissions of electronic data by computer (18 U.S.C.

Several court cases have raised the question of whether e-mail messages are protected under the stricter provisions of Title I while they were in transient storage en route to their final destination.

[10][11] ECPA has been criticized for failing to protect all communications and consumer records, mainly because the law is so outdated and out of touch with how people currently share, store, and use information.

All that is required to obtain the content of the emails by a law enforcement agency is a written statement certifying that the information is relevant to an investigation, without judicial review.

Data can be obtained on traffic and calling patterns of an individual or a group without a warrant, allowing an agency to gain valuable intelligence and possibly invade privacy without any scrutiny, because the actual content of the communication is left untouched.

While workplace communications are, in theory, protected, all that is needed to gain access to communiqué is for an employer to simply give notice or a supervisor to report that the employee's actions are not in the company's interest.

And federal law enforcement officials, citing technology advances, plan to ask for new regulations that would smooth their ability to perform legal wiretaps of various Internet communications.The analysis went on to discuss how Google, Facebook, Verizon, Twitter and other companies are in the middle between users and governments.