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The Supreme Court Fight Over Microsoft's Foreign Servers Is Over (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The much-anticipated Supreme Court case U.S. v. Microsoft -- which could have decided the extent of American jurisdiction over foreign servers -- is now, for all intents and purposes, dead. On March 30th, the Department of Justice moved to drop the lawsuit as moot, and today, Microsoft filed to agree with the motion. While the Supreme Court has yet to officially drop the case, it's a foregone conclusion that they will. Both the government and Microsoft agree that the newly passed CLOUD Act renders the lawsuit meaningless. In U.S. v. Microsoft, federal law enforcement clashed with Microsoft over the validity of a Stored Communications Act warrant for data stored on a server in Dublin. The CLOUD Act creates clear new procedures for procuring legal orders for data in these kinds of cross-border situations. In last week's motion to vacate, DOJ disclosed that it had procured a new warrant under the CLOUD Act.
Is this another invasive anti-privacy act, or does this one have all the correct and proper controls to protect the American people?
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The CLOUD Act was snuck into a must pass omnibus budget bill and not left on its own legs to be debated. But the biggest issue is that it makes it a international diplomatic affair to deal with what can best be described as a local law enforcement issue.
Now, I don't know about you, but I would rather my government concentrate on the bigger issues when doing international diplomacy and not having to constantly ring up someone in the ambassador chain of command in order to get a sign-off on this sort of thing. Analogy time: It's one thing to ask to borrow a cup of sugar or an egg from time to time of your neighbor. You know you're going to do it for them and probably have in the past. It's another thing to ask for 10 grams of sugar every hour. The first isn't a big deal, the latter can really put a strain on your relationship with them. To the point that they might tell you to go away.
And unless the point was to otherwise accelerate the international isolation of the US, then this was a poorly written piece whose authors knew it. Which is why it got attached as an amendment to a must-pass piece of legislation.
So, we have two losers and one winner here:
- American privacy rights are trampled, yet again
- American cloud providers lose access to EU markets since we cannot provide the privacy protections they require
+ American law enforcement and surveillance agencies get their Christmas wish at last
My vote this November is going to whoever promises to repeal this, regardless of the D/R/I after their name.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
As long as Google or (fill in corporation) wants to do business in the EU they will have to comply with the local laws.
EU civilians have legal enshrined privacy rights, yes that might be shocking to US citizens and corporations, deal with it.
The by far best solution for corporations and citizens in the EU is to keep their data in Europe, it avoids any misunderstandings about jurisdiction.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Indeed, the EU has to be much stricter implementing their privacy rules, they are fundamentally incompatible with keeping data offshore in the US.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."