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Microsoft To US Gov't: the World's Servers Are Not Yours For the Taking
Microsoft is currently fighting a legal battle with the U.S. government, who wants to search the company's servers in Ireland using a U.S. search warrant. An anonymous reader points out a new court filing from Microsoft that argues the U.S. itself would never stand for such reasoning from other governments. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith writes,
If the Government prevails, how can it complain if foreign agents require tech companies to download emails stored in the U.S.? This is a question the Department of Justice hasn’t yet addressed, much less answered. Yet the Golden Rule applies to international relations as well as to other human interaction. In one important sense, the issues at stake are even bigger than this. The Government puts at risk the fundamental privacy rights Americans have valued since the founding of the postal service. This is because it argues that, unlike your letters in the mail, emails you store in the cloud cease to belong exclusively to you. Instead, according to the Government, your emails become the business records of a cloud provider. Because business records have a lower level of legal protection, the Government claims it can use a different and broader legal authority to reach emails stored anywhere in the world.
I guess we'll just have to pay you for backdoor access like usual.
If you are a US citizen, I don't think you could get out of producing a document the court ordered you to supply by airmailing it to a confederate in another country. Similarly, if the data in question are related to Microsoft's US operations, then MS, being a corporation incorporated in the US, should be required to produce them.
And what do you think of MS's rebuttal of that position?
"Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany," Microsoft said. "They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter's box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei."
Allowing things like this is going down a similar road to "well if the CIA wants to torture foreign nationals, then they can't complain about foreign s[y agencies torturing US citizens"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...a server in every small business and a PC on every desktop was actually a good idea after all, because this Cloud thing means you own nothing, much less have control over it.
Agreed.
Reminds me of a great exchange I had with my crazy grandmother, that I still remember despite being like 7 years old at the time: I was whining because I was bored of sitting in her hotel room and wanted to go play in the pool. She said something like, "don't you know the world doesn't revolve around you? It revolves around *me*!" (She said it jokingly, but if you knew her, you would know that she didn't really mean it as a joke.)
On the same note, Microsoft clearly doesn't believe the world's servers are the US government's for the taking, because they know full well, they're *Microsoft's* for the taking. Remember that incident with no-ip a few months ago, where Microsoft declared no-ip was letting spammers use its domain, snatched like a million domains belonging to no-ip users, and proceeded to completely botch everything up? That was awesome.
And what do you think of MS's rebuttal of that position?
"Imagine this scenario...."
That's a good scenario, and it raises some interesting questions that SHOULD also be looked at. But its fundamentally a different scenario.
The part where it breaks down though is that they have a warrant to seize the documents of a New York Times reporter.
The New York Times is a wholly American company. ... THEN it would be equivalent.
The New York Times reporter is presumed to be an American citizen. If the "New York Times" were a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutche Bank and the New York Times employee was instead a German citizen and an employee of Deutche Bank
Lets compare apples to apples.
But the ad-driven Internet has effectively relegated personal documents to business records. When google is already reading and adding commercials to every email, it's much harder to argue these are intended to be private, person-to-person communications. Google's multi-billion dollar business actually is snooping, and its users consent to that.
Last I checked, Ireland was not part of the US.
But they managed to kill 400,000 Americans every year
I'm fairly certain that they didn't actually light the cig for me, nor did they put it in my mouth or anything else.
I started smoking of my own free will, and likewise, I stopped.
They've done plenty of scummy things along the way, but pretending they are the sole responsible party just makes you look stupid and unwilling to take responsibility for your own actions. Man up.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But they managed to kill 400,000 Americans every year
I'm fairly certain that they didn't actually light the cig for me, nor did they put it in my mouth or anything else.
I started smoking of my own free will, and likewise, I stopped.
They've done plenty of scummy things along the way, but pretending they are the sole responsible party just makes you look stupid and unwilling to take responsibility for your own actions. Man up.
Not only did they manipulate you with the most expensive, sophisticated marketing programs the world has seen outside of government, and not only did they get you hooked to the most addicting drug known, they even convinced you that it was your free will, your fault and your personal responsibility.
Google can't fine me a bajillion dollars and throw my ass in jail till I die.
I masturbate in the bathroom. I pull my blinds down, but they don't cover every little crack, someone who goes up 15 feet, could possibly squint through a crack and see me fapping. Does that make it hard to argue that I wasn't trying to have privacy? How fucking stupid.
They say they also aren't "reading the emails" per se, just lifting keywords from it. Who makes the same argument? Who? Oh wait, that's right, NSA. They aren't spying on you.... they're just looking for keywords in phone conversations, etc, for probable cause.
Look, I have a right to be secure in my persons, houses, papers, and effects in possesions from the government conducting unreasonable searches and seizures. Just because I don't have a perfect lock system, doesn't mean they get to open my door and file through everything because my obvious intent didn't perfectly align with my actions.
The government uses intent a lot for crimes. Well, the person's intent for email is to have their inbox private. That should be good enough. The government's role in all of this is to pass laws making my inbox a lot more secure, having standards for encryptions, etc.
I'm sorry I live in a country where most citizens see nothing wrong with the government mandating shitty backdoors into everything.