Microsoft: Feds Are 'Rewriting' the Law To Obtain Emails Overseas 100
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was written in 1986. It's incredibly outdated, yet it still governs many internet-related rights for U.S. citizens. Microsoft has now challenged Congress to update the legislation for how online communications work in 2015. The company is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the government over a court order to release emails stored in a foreign country to U.S. authorities. In a new legal brief (PDF), Microsoft says, "For an argument that purports to rest on the 'explicit text of the statute,' the Government rewrites an awful lot of it. Congress never intended to reach, nor even anticipated, private communications stored in a foreign country when it enacted [the ECPA]." In an accompanying blog post, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith wrote, "Until U.S. law is rewritten, we believe that the court in our case should honor well-established precedents that limit the government's reach from extending beyond U.S. borders. ... To the contrary, it is clear Congress's intent was to ensure that your digital information is afforded the same legal protections as your physical documents and correspondence, a principle we at Microsoft believe should be preserved."
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Well, the first and last time I installed iTunes, just to check it out, it installed Safari and Bonjour without my approval. It also automatically scanned my music library, retagging and renaming my stuff without input or consent. That is the definition of malware and installing something as utterly worthless as Bonjour was probably for spying/phoning home.
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What happened to the nerds that were there 15 years ago ? Are they all dead ? How can we communicate with tech-unsavvy people who decided to hang here ?
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Yes, Anonymous Coward was born a LONG time ago. Unfortunately, he is also immortal.
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For those of you that don't get it, 256 bytes of memory is 2048 bits, or 0.25 k.
Yes, we really did write entire programs that would fit into a pair of tweets, or less.
Re: Pot vs. Kettle (Score:1)
Quite a few of us graybeards here son.
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Classic anonymous, definitive, condescending, semi-violent reply : Slashdot is back !
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Every install Java? Forget to tell it you don't want that browser bar? Much as I hate to say it, installing superfluous software is mainstream.
Got any evidence that Bonjour is phoning home or spying? If not, I'd remove that tinfoil hat, as it seems to be concentrating the mind control rays [boingboing.net].
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I stopped keeping a large digital music collection when I upgraded iTunes and it decided to nuke my entire library on installing the newest version. 80 GB of music, all perfectly tagged, all gone. That was back around 2007, whichever version that was.
Needless to say, I was furious. I also no longer use iTunes.
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Besides, to properly list the various activities involved, it would take way more space than anyone else cares to scroll through.
On top of that, the Haters aren't going to become fans no matter how much you disagree, and the Fans aren't going to see past their apple colored glasses and agree with the haters.
Thanks, now please get back to the task at hand of declaring microsoft evil for doing the right thing for
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Are you too young to understand why Microsoft earned the nickname : The Evil Empire? Or are you just completely uninformed and willing to sound like a fool? If this seems rude to you, it is because you know you have no idea what you're talking about.
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Are you too young to understand why Microsoft earned the nickname : The Evil Empire? Or are you just completely uninformed and willing to sound like a fool? If this seems rude to you, it is because you know you have no idea what you're talking about.
Microsoft acquired that nickname because of nefarious business practices, not gathering and selling customers' private data.
Re:Pot vs. Kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny when Google, Apple or Microsoft complain about privacy issues.
Maybe that should tell you something about how overweening the US government has become...
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No, it should tell you that they have all been abusing the tax code and are about to be asked to pay their fair share of income tax
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look man it's simple business.
they will lose the cloud services to local players if they have to act as if everything was stored in the usa.
what's shameful is that other governments aren't bitching to usa. some of them may be obliged to sue google, apple, ms etc if they export private data in ways that is against the local rules(like giving them to usa without engaging in a legal request in said country).
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There are a whole lot of people in the US who have no business whining about the government "rewriting" laws to suit its purpose. They have been perfectly happy with that when it suits their purpose.
Re:Pot vs. Kettle (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. ACA employer mandate causing politically inconvenient layoffs in election years? Punt that down the road. Three times. Yay! ACA Cadillac plan excise tax giving your union constituents heartburn? Punt that one to 2018. Yay! Immigration laws angering your constituents? Ignore/rewrite that stuff. Yay! Medicare Advantage cuts have the AARP up in arms? Pencil whip that one out of existence. Yay!
NSA playing fast and loose with your papers and effects? (selective) OUTRAGE! (selective) OUTRAGE!
A government powerful enough to deliver all the social justice you demand is powerful enough to exercise its own prerogatives.
Re:Pot vs. Kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy? None of the companies care about privacy. But they care about losing business. And that's something that can happen very easily if the US can simply say "fork it over" when it comes to data stored in their data centers abroad.
The insecurity is already bad enough for their business, and if your congresscritters don't act quickly and decide against it, US companies will be an absolute no-go for data storage for companies in Europe and even more so in the middle east. Knowing that the US government could at a whim decide that they want to have all your email traffic means that companies will decide against US companies when it comes to storing their data. Simply out of self interest.
And in the current climate, being able to say that no US company gets a hold of your precious data is also good PR.
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It's funny when Google, Apple or Microsoft complain about privacy issues.
Google, sure. But not Apple or Microsoft. For companies like Google and Facebook, you are the product [forbes.com] and privacy is a roadblock they work around. Microsoft and Apple represents a different kind of company that wants you to buy actual products from them, and behave far better in this area. When customers desire privacy, these will try to sell you products that delivers this [theguardian.com].
Obama won running against "warrantless wiretaps" (Score:1)
Fooled ya!
The inversion is complete. (Score:4, Interesting)
Once upon a time, we expected our intelligence agencies to spy overseas but leave our local privacy alone.
Now, spy agencies tap every domestic communications channel, but apparently spying overseas is bad.
Re:The inversion is complete. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about spying its about compliance with records requests and privacy laws. EU has all kinds of (frankly downright crazy) privacy laws around email. That make it difficult to hand records to anything third party (that isn't an EU or member nation organ) and still be in compliance with the letter of the law; the US government is arguing that our courts etc have the power to subpena records on overseas servers.
This puts companies like Microsoft between a rock an hard place, they essentially can't follow both sets of rules if US jurisdictional rules are not limited in scope to well, the US.
I am not sure what the right answer is here, but it is a problem.
Re:The inversion is complete. (Score:5, Interesting)
The right answer would be to move all corporate operations outside of the US, as they no longer have to comply with both US and EU laws.
Really, a company this large threatening to actually up & move would make the US fold so fast it would be comical.
Wow, can't believe I'm actually rooting for MS here. How times have changed.
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The answer is not to use (online) services from parties also based in the U.S. Even if the company really wants to protect your data, the U.S. government might force them to give it up anyway. Choose local providers, or better yet, host your own data.
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This is exactly what MS is afraid of, and why they fight it tooth and nail. If the US government gets its way, any US company can wave good-bye to any data storage plans outside the US.
Re:The inversion is complete. (Score:4, Insightful)
Two sides of the same coin, isn't it? The government wants data about foreigners, from a foreign place. They want, in short, to spy. Their chosen method of attack is to pressure people in the USA who happen to have access to that data, as opposed to e.g. placing a mole inside a foreign organisation, but the tactic used does not change the goal of the mission.
EU privacy regulators don't have a great reputation I agree, but perhaps once the most productive parts of America have been ruled for decades by a totalitarian communist state that has informers in every street, you might not see the rules as all that crazy.
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Two sides of the same coin, isn't it?
No its not. A records request in accordance with some kind of due process that is public information and established before the event, is decidedly not spying.
You are welcome to consider such a process bad law, and objectionable for any number of reasons but its a very different animal. At least someone is accountable for it, whether its a judge who signed a warrant and legislator who signed the law authorizing record sharing with $AGENCY. There is a (theoretically) functional political process by whic
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Two sides of the same coin, isn't it? The government wants data about foreigners, from a foreign place. They want, in short, to spy. Their chosen method of attack is to pressure people in the USA who happen to have access to that data, as opposed to e.g. placing a mole inside a foreign organisation, but the tactic used does not change the goal of the mission.
Replace USA and Ireland with China and USA respectively and ask yourself if you think it's okay for the Chinese government to subpoena a Chinese company to provide data from a US subsidiary about US citizens, stored in the US. My guess is that most Americans would strongly object to their data being handed over to foreign governments that way, particularly without the US legal system getting a say. In particular, to a court not bound by the 4th amendment or any other protection that data might have had unde
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This isn't about spying its about compliance with records requests and privacy laws. EU has all kinds of (frankly downright crazy) privacy laws around email. That make it difficult to hand records to anything third party (that isn't an EU or member nation organ) and still be in compliance with the letter of the law; the US government is arguing that our courts etc have the power to subpena records on overseas servers.
This puts companies like Microsoft between a rock an hard place, they essentially can't follow both sets of rules if US jurisdictional rules are not limited in scope to well, the US.
The answer is for the DoJ to make a mutual legal assistance request to the Irish government and get a valid Irish court order for the material held in Ireland. I understand this case is about alleged drug smuggling, which is a crime in both countries so the Irish court is unlikely to create many difficulties.
This is the way these cases were always previously handled. In fact, there is an explicit treaty [state.gov] confirming this.
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The right answer is actually very simple. The US government should be following well established international conventions and request the information it wants through the appropriate courts, which in this case is Irelands court. There is no grey area, The US government are trying to stomp on the laws of other countries so they can avoid due process.
Re: The inversion is complete. (Score:1)
Advice from one of my mentors, treat email like a postcard, assume everybody along the delivery route can read it, if they choose to do so.
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The first is that everything is standard now, because everyone's running the same stuff. To spy on the Nazis, the Polish and British had to break the "Enigma" devices that the Germans were using. Nobody in Britain was using these, let alone anywhere but Germany and its allies. Same for Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, etc. The US breaking the Japanese codes to gain advance knowledge of the attack on Midway couldn't ha
Re:No Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
it doesn't matter (Score:2)
The other countries already do this. And no, the US doesn't like it. No one does.
Every country expects their laws to be followed and considers them supreme to all others. If a law is broken in the US, the US expects to be able to subpoena the evidence even if it is in another country. And other countries feel the same way.
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Why should it tolerate a multi-national corporation getting itself into a situation where observing the laws of one nation put it violation of another?
No individual country has an obligation to make it easy or hard for a multi-national corporation to comply with the laws of multiple countries simultaneously. That is a responsibility the corporation took on when it entered business in multiple countries.
Re:No Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a US based corporation, subject to US law,
Are you certain? Isn't it possible that Microsoft Ireland is a separate corporate entity from Microsoft USA?
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No, its just a foreign investment by a US company. Like T-Mobile is the US investment of German company Deutsche Telekom, or Sony Corporation of American is the US investment of Japan's Sony Corp. But the whole thing is rather moot, since because of mutual legal assistance treaties its very likely that a foreign court wouldn't block a US court order to produce evidence if such an order were legal in that country. Microsoft is arguing against extraterritorial application of US law, but courts have ruled in t
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because of mutual legal assistance treaties its very likely that a foreign court wouldn't block a US court order to produce evidence
I think this is correct. But I believe that the problem here is that the FBI is expecting a foreign government to comply with one of its national security letters. In other words, no courts, no warrants.
As to whether Microsoft Ireland is a seperate legal entity in the eyes of the Irish legal system, that's an issue for Irish law as well. In the USA, a US subsidiary of a foreign parent is expected to comply with US law.
Target Canada (Score:5, Insightful)
So how is it then when "Target Canada" or other such companies go bankrupt, that "Target USA" isn't liable for all the debts they left behind?
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Irrelevant. The US court isn't ordering Microsoft Ireland to do anything, it is ordering Microsoft US. If Microsoft US can't get it back from Microsoft Ireland that is not the US court's problem.
Re:No Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
And your branch is doing business in Ireland which means it's subject to Irish law, which says that if you hand over those documents you're breaking it.
So, MS, you may decide now which law you wish to break.
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Yes, that's exactly the problem here. Ireland wants MS to comply with its law. That law does allow for legal assistance to the US, but the US would have to honor the process, which they plan not to do.
Simply transferring the "bits" to a US server by itself would already be a legal problem. Possibly. So far nobody bothered to have it taken to court, but "simply" pushing data from a EU storage center to the US ain't so "simple" legal wise. Or what would you say if they "simply" pushed every mail on a US serve
This is all smoke and mirrors (Score:1)
This whole thing is just a way for Microsoft to try and generate a smokescreen of FUD around the fact that they are just like Apple, Google and Yahoo in that they actually give the NSA access to whatever they want, and have been doing so since at least December 2007.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com]
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com]
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In case there's someone here that doesn't know since the media has buried this story of racism and hate, this is the new ruler of Microsoft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Thompson
He even hates the Democrats so much that he supported Obama in 2008 pretty hard and spent six figures of his own money in support because he knew that his dumbass's support hurts Obama. That is how much he hates Obama. He fucking supported him to fuck him. Those Republicans are devious. Microsoft was regressive under the
This should be no different to physical documents (Score:4, Insightful)
The feds cant use a warrant obtained in the USA to require a US based company to hand over physical documents stored in a foreign company, why should they be able to do it for electronic documents?
If the feds REALLY need this data so badly, why dont they just go to Ireland or wherever the data is being held and get a warrant from there?
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They have their business in mind. And they know exactly that nobody is going to entrust them with their sensitive data if this could at any time get siphoned away by US government who just might have an interest to hand over valuable research data to US companies that just so happened to stuff the campaign purse of whoever is in charge.
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Then where's the problem? Tell Ireland what's cooking and they will certainly assist, issue the warrant for the data and MS will not only comply with all laws concerned but certainly gladly hand over the data.
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Nobody is going to entrust their data to Microsoft US if one day it turns out they can't get your data back from whatever foreign country they shipped it off to.
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Irrelevant. Microsoft US already stipulated that they could aces the records.
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The feds cant use a warrant obtained in the USA to require a US based company to hand over physical documents stored in a foreign company, why should they be able to do it for electronic documents?
What are you smoking. Sure the feds can't use a warrant obtained in the US to go kick in a door on foreign soil, they have to ask the local government their nicely to do it for them (unless its in the Middle East than we just do it anyway); but they certainly can subpena records.
You think for example during the Enron trials if they had just said "gee SEC we don't have to comply with these subpenas for records because we do all out accounting out of our Mexico City office", the feds would have responded "
uhh.. (Score:4, Funny)
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Funny that you should mention these two countries of all the possibilities. I know someone [wikipedia.org] who might wonder whether this is true.
Obama Hurts Another US Company... (Score:3, Interesting)
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The name of MS is actually still in pretty high esteem where it counts: Big companies. I doubt that MS cares too much whether Joe Randomuser dumps his Hotmail account in favor of ... uh ... hmmm... well, anyway.
What they care about is losing "cloud" business. They invested quite heavily in the whole cloud service crap and if the US gov presses this one, this may well falter before it even started to take off. Who'd want to store their data with someone who has to hand it over to their government at little m
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Richrz,
I feel you but I am really afraid that Rand simply isn't his father. I am not sure who Rand or Ted Cruz really are. They don't seem very consistent to me, and in Rands case I don't see much evidence that once faced with 'the realities of the office' he would utterly bend over and just pick up with Bush and Obama left off.
Who we need is someone like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
who has announced he is going to run in 2016.
don't trust anything from the USA (Score:3)
Every American manufacturer and service provider is suspect because of these government demands. Digital equipment may have back doors for the convenience of government spies. Cloud services are probably being watched. Software may have embedded spyware.
If you were a foreign company or government would you trust anything coming from the US? Even a US company or individual can't trust our own companies. Our government is making us non-competitive worldwide. (Open source products may be safer.)
Another reason not to give your data to Microsoft (Score:2)
Would you be willing to pay Microsoft US to store you data if one day they could say "whoops, we gave it to Microsoft Ireland and now it is illegal to get it back. Here's your bill"?
Oversea Accounting information (Score:2)