U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that he supports the proposed privacy changes that would require the government to secure a warrant based on probable cause before being allowed to view email, documents and other files stored in the cloud,according to a report by ZDNet.

Holder’s comments come a month after the Obama Administration confirmed Presidential Policy Directive 20, a new initiative that will lay out a classified national policy for responding to attacks on the US national computing infrastructure.

With this endorsement, Holder becomes the highest ranking White House official to go on record to supporting the cloud-stored privacy measures.

“But the more general notion of having a warrant to obtain the content of communications from a service provider is something that we support,” said Holder.

He added that citizen privacy and the government’s ability to access this data is an extremely important issue, and that there are “very limited circumstances” in which these privacy measures should be overlooked, such as in civil investigations.

Holder’s support for the privacy measures is a giant step forward considering that just two years ago the Justice Department warned that police investigations and “human life” would be under threat if authorities required search warrants for email and location data.

The current e-storage rules stated in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act allows U.S. authorities to access email that is more than six months old or email that is marked as “read” or opened, when equipped with a subpoena signed by a federal prosecutor.

Authorities only require a judge-signed warrant to view email that is less than six months old.

Additionally, the government only needs to offer an administrative subpoena in which it has “reasonable grounds to believe” that the data would support an active investigation.

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