The year was 1986. Top Gun was the top movie, Super Mario Bros. 2 was the hot videogame, practically no one had ever heard of email, and mobile phones were clunky and expensive novelties the size of a brick.

On October 21st of that year, the President signed into law the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or "ECPA", to better protect our electronic privacy against unwarranted government snooping.

ECPA was forward-looking when Congress passed it, considering that the World Wide Web hadn't even been invented yet and that if you were savvy enough to have email you probably dialed up to a BBS to get it. But now, eons later in Internet time, technology has passed the law by.

ECPA has become outdated and the privacy standards that it applies to new technologies are unclear and often too weak. For example, the law doesn’t specifically address cell phone location tracking at all, and it allows the government to seize most emails without ever having to go to a judge. Meanwhile, no one is perfectly sure how it applies to newer online services like social networks and search engines. This gap between the law and the technology ultimately leaves everyone's privacy at risk.

Now, in the 21st century, when we store years-worth of our private emails in the Internet “cloud” and are all carrying tracking devices in our pockets in the form of our cell phones, we need an electronic privacy law upgrade that sends a clear message to law enforcement:

We at EFF have come together with a broad coalition of major Internet companies like Google and Microsoft and privacy organizations like the Center for Democracy & Technology and ACLU as part of the Digital Due Process coalition. The DDP coalition’s overriding goal is to transmit one simple message to Congress: If the government wants to track our cell phones, or see what web sites we’ve visited, or rummage through our Hotmail, or read our private messages on Facebook, or otherwise invade our electronic privacy, it should have to go to a judge and get a search warrant based on probable cause.

You can help us get that critical message to Congress just in time for ECPA’s 25th anniversary on October 21st. Join EFF, ACLU, CDT, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Americans for Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and TechFreedom in the fight to upgrade ECPA for the 21st century and sign our joint petition today.

And if you've already signed the petition, please remember to share it with your friends and social networking sites.