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.

Comments

It's bullshit, but it's the same bullshit as usual

[Qzukk]

The government has always claimed that they can show up and take anything that I give to anyone else without any kind of warrant or subpoena, unless the person I gave the item to has the balls to go to the mat for me over it.

Email on a cloud provider server? That's taking candy from a baby, they've probably already cashed their check from the NSA.

Hiding evidence

[flink]

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.

Re:Hiding evidence

[nbauman]

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.

That's what the tobacco companies did in the 1960s.

They did a lot of research to find out if cigarettes really caused lung cancer and all those other things.

If their research came out favorable to cigarettes, they could have waved it around to "rebut" the Surgeon
General and get the regulators off their backs.

Their researchers found that cigarettes were harmful too.

So the tobacco executives told the researchers to kill all their animals, and destroy all their written results, and their lawyers wrote a few memos summarizing the whole thing. Lawyer-client privilege is the strongest secrecy you can have. Then they sent the memos to their law firm in London.

It finally got out. After a lot of lawsuits, the tobacco companies finally agreed to come clean with everything. But they managed to kill 400,000 Americans every year, and none of them went to jail. Eat your heart out, Osama bin Laden.

The US Is Like Fantasia

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Atreyu: But I can't! I can't get beyond the boundaries of Fantasia!
[G'mork laughs and Atreyu gets a little angry]
Atreyu: What's so funny about that?
G'mork: Fantasia has no boundaries.

Ibid

[pigoon]

The real crime is that legalese hasn't been reduced into a programming language so we can outsource these lawyers.
Pretty sure we could reduce all lawyers into a Tit-For-Tat game theory program.

While not (the universe is dead)
Whatever you say; I disagree
End

Ibid.