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Microsoft: Feds Are 'Rewriting' the Law To Obtain Emails Overseas
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was written in 1986. It's incredibly outdated, yet it still governs many internet-related rights for U.S. citizens. Microsoft has now challenged Congress to update the legislation for how online communications work in 2015. The company is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the government over a court order to release emails stored in a foreign country to U.S. authorities. In a new legal brief (PDF), Microsoft says, "For an argument that purports to rest on the 'explicit text of the statute,' the Government rewrites an awful lot of it. Congress never intended to reach, nor even anticipated, private communications stored in a foreign country when it enacted [the ECPA]." In an accompanying blog post, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith wrote, "Until U.S. law is rewritten, we believe that the court in our case should honor well-established precedents that limit the government's reach from extending beyond U.S. borders. ... To the contrary, it is clear Congress's intent was to ensure that your digital information is afforded the same legal protections as your physical documents and correspondence, a principle we at Microsoft believe should be preserved."
It's funny when Google, Apple or Microsoft complain about privacy issues.
Maybe that should tell you something about how overweening the US government has become...
This isn't about spying its about compliance with records requests and privacy laws. EU has all kinds of (frankly downright crazy) privacy laws around email. That make it difficult to hand records to anything third party (that isn't an EU or member nation organ) and still be in compliance with the letter of the law; the US government is arguing that our courts etc have the power to subpena records on overseas servers.
This puts companies like Microsoft between a rock an hard place, they essentially can't follow both sets of rules if US jurisdictional rules are not limited in scope to well, the US.
I am not sure what the right answer is here, but it is a problem.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The right answer would be to move all corporate operations outside of the US, as they no longer have to comply with both US and EU laws.
Really, a company this large threatening to actually up & move would make the US fold so fast it would be comical.
Wow, can't believe I'm actually rooting for MS here. How times have changed.
Would the US tolerate a foreign company operating in the US doing what complies with its home country laws but that violates US laws? I doubt it.
You're a US based corporation, subject to US law,
Are you certain? Isn't it possible that Microsoft Ireland is a separate corporate entity from Microsoft USA?
Have gnu, will travel.
Privacy? None of the companies care about privacy. But they care about losing business. And that's something that can happen very easily if the US can simply say "fork it over" when it comes to data stored in their data centers abroad.
The insecurity is already bad enough for their business, and if your congresscritters don't act quickly and decide against it, US companies will be an absolute no-go for data storage for companies in Europe and even more so in the middle east. Knowing that the US government could at a whim decide that they want to have all your email traffic means that companies will decide against US companies when it comes to storing their data. Simply out of self interest.
And in the current climate, being able to say that no US company gets a hold of your precious data is also good PR.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So how is it then when "Target Canada" or other such companies go bankrupt, that "Target USA" isn't liable for all the debts they left behind?