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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.
US Gov't to Microsoft: "All your servers are belong to us"
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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.
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.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
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.