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Microsoft Defies Court Order, Will Not Give Emails To US Government
schwit1 sends this excerpt from a report about Microsoft:
Despite a federal court order directing Microsoft to turn overseas-held email data to federal authorities, the software giant said Friday it will continue to withhold that information as it waits for the case to wind through the appeals process. The judge has now ordered both Microsoft and federal prosecutors to advise her how to proceed by next Friday, September 5.
Let there be no doubt that Microsoft's actions in this controversial case are customer-centric. The firm isn't just standing up to the US government on moral principles. It's now defying a federal court order. "Microsoft will not be turning over the email and plans to appeal," a Microsoft statement notes. "Everyone agrees this case can and will proceed to the appeals court. This is simply about finding the appropriate procedure for that to happen."
Let there be no doubt that Microsoft's actions in this controversial case are customer-centric. The firm isn't just standing up to the US government on moral principles. It's now defying a federal court order. "Microsoft will not be turning over the email and plans to appeal," a Microsoft statement notes. "Everyone agrees this case can and will proceed to the appeals court. This is simply about finding the appropriate procedure for that to happen."
Isn't there a NSA backdoor to MS?
Microsoft's actions might seem "customer-centric," but really they're fighting for their lives.
If MS can be forced to give up European data, stored on European servers, that's game over for them.
Lawsuits and investigations will flourish in Europe, because their data protection laws are much stronger/stricter than ours.
This could kill MS's European business.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
By a not too unreasonable extension of the theory that allows the judge to compel microsoft to deliver things they control on a computer in another country - I see no reason exactly the same would not apply to compelling them to deliver a personalised update to one particular computer and deliver access to that computer - wherever in the world it was, and whoever owned it.
Well its not just MS, ANY company. Google, Apple, etc would be effected by this as well.
...anyone who seriously store sensitive information on a cloud service like free-email, should be spanked with a trout over and over again.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Frankly, I don't care if MS is standing up out of self-interest or for some other cause, the tyrants in D.C. need to be stopped. Period.
You can't apply U.S. laws to the world at large, regardless of your 'legal' standing.
Many U.S. organizations have presence and pay taxes in many different jurisdictions, making them subject to that particular territory's law. Will the U.S. allow some other country to violate U.S. laws because the subsidiary is present, in say, Aman and thus, by extension, the entire organization is subject to Aman's Law?
The answer is no, because jurisdiction is territorial. You can't apply Ireland's law to MS in the U.S. simply because they have a corporate office there, thus the reverse is true too: you can' t apply U.S. law to a subsidiary in Ireland.
Who owns it is irrelevant; corporations are legal entities of their own, regardless of ownership. Ships owned by, say Americans (most cruise ships for example), are registered in Panama, thus bypassing U.S. Labor laws because who owns them is irrelevant.
Trust me, you don't want to go there: it will open lawsuits against U.S. firms, under U.S. laws, against the owners of such ships and other corporations that use underage labor, exceed working hours / conditions, etc. in other countries.
It would basically make International Law obsolete as we know it.
It appears that the U.S. Government is bent in destroying the American economy while 'preserving' American security.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
I'm suspecting the zeal MS is showing in challenging the US gov't has more to do with laying the groundword of "nation-states" being neutered. This is about power in the future. If they win against the US gov't this is just one more nail in the coffin of the battle to make governments useless. This goes hand in hand with the Trans Pacific and other trade agreements. These things are designed to strip power from government.
This is just one more step in the march of capitalism that will likely destroy civilization in the long run.
People and businesses and governments everywhere will be watching this one.
If America can force Microsoft to reach out to Ireland for data, then Germany (etc.) can force Microsoft to tunnel into America, right?
And, as mentioned, people, businesses and governments are already skeptical of the cloud, anyway.
People, businesses and governments may force "data nationalism" to become the norm.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The US needs to wake up to the fact that they are not "world law." Their law ends at the boundaries of the US.
It doesn't matter if the email account in question is owned by an American. It doesn't matter if the servers are indirectly owned by an American company.
They are in a foreign jurisdiction and the US government needs to go through the judicial and legal processes of that jurisdiction if they want access to the data.
Quite frankly, fuck the "war on terror", the "war on drugs", and every other tired old excuse the US government and it's subservient courts use to try to justify shoving the US legal system down the world's throat.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Notwithstanding some really rare cases (e.g. interlocutory), which this does not appear to be, an order is unenforceable while under appeal.
Doing what an order asks is grounds for dismissal of an appeal, notwithstanding cases where acts are made explicitly with the agreement of the parties and sometimes affirmation of the court to be without prejudice to the right of appeal. However in cases of disclosure of information, the disclosure is generally a form of prejudice (since it cannot be undone) that undermines appellate entitlement.
So it is wrong to say they are are defying an order. They are doing what everyone does on appeal.
If they were to defy an order they could be held in contempt of court. That would be an interesting story.
> Russian FSB has actually wrung Windows code reviews out of Microsoft so if they didn't find any back door in that code I'd say there are none to find...
So it's entirely possible to do a code review of an entire operating system and be sure that there are no vulnerabilities?
Of course, you can't be sure that something as simple as an ssl library is safe, but an entire OS is no problem. Despite the fact that there's no way to know if the code you're reviewing matches the installed binaries.
> there is always the option of doing a personal code review of what is it now, 200 million plus? lines of Linux source code and then compiling your own Slackware
Yep, that'd be even easier than the Windows code review, especially since thousands of other people have already done some initial review for you. You can then compile it yourself and know that the source code matches the binary, unlike Windows.
(The trojaned compiler attack is fairly trivial to defeat, so don't bother going there .)
Microsoft is headquartered and incorporated in the US and thus subject to US law.
Yep. That's completely true. So if there were some data held on a server in the EU, and a judge decided it was relevant to a lawsuit and demanded that it be presented, they could reasonably hold some representative of the corporation to be in contempt of court until such time as they produced the data in question. However, it would not actually establish any entitlement to that data, nor make it not a violation of various laws if they were to seize it be force.
QED.
QED, what you have said is irrelevant.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The US is in a weak position, because in order to create a uniform standard of international law to address this sort of thing, the US will have to work as an equal with other countries who are already suspicious of US motives. The US knows this, which is why they are trying to bulldoze their way through this. The issue here is international law, and the laws of other countries involved. The HUGE problem is this: If MS is forced to turn over the data that is in another country (and possibly causing MS to violate the laws of that country) , then another country, using exactly the same ruling, could force a US company to obey its laws. Here's and example: Russia finds a worm , virus, whatever in some software that it's government is using, and that their data was stolen. Russian law allows confiscation of all computer hardware and the people involved held in jail until trial in Russia. The Russian government decides that the infection was present in software that was on the computer at the time of purchase, and as a result that company must have Russia's data, so now Russia can send its enforcers over here and confiscate..... Ooops. What MS is doing is trying to prevent a very shortsighted US ruling of opening a Pandora's box that can be used against the US.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy