No Duh

Your emails from the last year or five years ago are constitutionally protected from government snooping, right? As much as anything else is protected.

Well, no. In 1986, Congress passed a law declaring files like that (which barely existed at the time for the vast majority of people) "abandoned" if they are more than six months old. Despite the fact that dead letters at the Post Office are still protected.

There's a bill in Minnesota that would change our state's constitution to correct this bit of stupidity, and it sounds like it has a good chance of getting passed in the legislature so we can approve it on our next ballot.

That can't happen soon enough. But how stupid is it to have to amend our constitution to make it the way everyone assumes it already is under the Bill of Rights?