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

US Government to Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess we'll just have to pay you for backdoor access like usual.

Re:US Government to Microsoft

[DUdsen]

Exactly - I was wondering if this is all for show ... convince us Europeans that our data on servers in Dublin is safe from prying eyes in the USA. Once we stop worrying then it will be business as usual, but the heat will be off from the USA. Unfortunately: once suspicions have been raised, those who really care will not forget, so welcome to private pictures of cute pussies and of illicit love letters, but the stuff that they really wanted will, often, be located elsewhere.

What they are playing for here is not to get the NSA out but to get the shadowy backroom dealers of the federal level to put weight on the open court not to openly declare that date hosted at an american owned data-center falls under US and not EU law regardless of contracts and location. The problem is corporate contracts and government tenders, if an competitor can make an good case with "public evidende" that the an US owned datacenter cannot live up to EU data protection regulation they are cut of from that market entirely. And a court case count a lot more then a set of newspaper articles here. If MS looses this one MS azure and office365 revenue will go down significantly, as they have now given the EU governments all the ammunition it needs to ban American owned companies from bidding without facing IMO/ITO lawsuits.

Microsoft To US Gov't: the World's Servers Are Not

[The Grim Reefer]

US Gov't to Microsoft: "All your servers are belong to us"

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

[OzPeter]

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"

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.

Re:Hiding evidence

[vux984]

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.
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 ... THEN it would be equivalent.

Lets compare apples to apples.

Re:Hiding evidence

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:Hiding evidence

[nbauman]

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.

So, what MS is saying is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Yep, they're not the US Government's

[neminem]

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.

Re:Yep, they're not the US Government's

[david_thornley]

Read the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment does not mention geography, and uses the words "people" and "person" instead of "citizen".

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.

Re:It's bullshit, but it's the same bullshit as us

[timeOday]

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.