Microsoft To US Gov't: the World's Servers Are Not Yours For the Taking 192
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 Government to Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
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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
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So? Haven't you been following any other Microsof news? They don't run Windows for their servers, that's just something they sell to chumps. They run mostly Linux servers themselves!
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I thought most of their servers where OpenBSD, not Linux... But yea...
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Yah, we need a second 800lb Gorilla. That way they can point nukes at each other and keep soldiers with their fingers hovering above the buttons. Kids can go back to learning "duck and cover" in school and McCarthy's grandson can go on a witchunt just like god intended.
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Soon after January of 2009, the US budget deficit, after decades of steadily increasing in complexity, became self-aware. It began interpreting all investigations, suits, elections and other checks on US federal governmental power as threats to its just sovereignty of the world. As we speak, a small group of technologically oriented Republicans is desperately trying to find a way of sending an emissary fifty years back in time to warn humans in the time of the Johnson administration that this is how the wo
Microsoft To US Gov't: the World's Servers Are Not (Score:4, Funny)
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Well... sort of.
They move their profits to their Irish subsidiary, but the US government may still have some legal authority to enforce their will, especially if it can be argued that the Irish branch is wholly controlled by US-based entities. Those American entities may be compelled to, in turn, force the cooperation of the Irish corporation.
It's bullshit, but it's the same bullshit as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That is patently false. Warrants have always been used to access storage units and safe deposit boxes. Have there been exceptions? Certainly as there are always exceptions but those exceptions also generally get thrown out.
The real problem is that too many people have been way too happy to promote the thinking that if it didn't exist the late 1700's, then it wasn't covered in the Bill of Rights. The first example of this is guns and liberals are still making this claim on a daily basis.
Personal effects sho
Re:It's bullshit, but it's the same bullshit as us (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google can't fine me a bajillion dollars and throw my ass in jail till I die.
I masturbate in the bathroom. I pull my blinds down, but they don't cover every little crack, someone who goes up 15 feet, could possibly squint through a crack and see me fapping. Does that make it hard to argue that I wasn't trying to have privacy? How fucking stupid.
They say they also aren't "reading the emails" per se, just lifting keywords from it. Who makes the same argument? Who? Oh wait, that's right, NSA. They aren'
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The unthinkable has happened: people have grown up.
Since when is giving up and letting yourself be treated like shit been considered "being a grown up"?
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So you agree with Johnny Ives then?
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<sarcasm>Yes, that's true. Freedom of the Press obviously only applies to Gutenburg-type manual presses, not high speed lithography and photocopiers. And certainly not electronic media, which the founding fathers could have never envisioned.</sarcasm>
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I don't think one counter-example really disproves his point.
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Well the second amendment is kind of an anachronism. The only other bill of rights that included arms that I'm aware of is the Bill of Rights (1689) which allowed the right to bear arms for self defence. When it comes to arms, much has changed in the 200+ plus years since the 2nd amendment was written. Most countries have police that are responsible to the people, arms have totally changed, in the 18th century arms included swords and such as well as firearms and firearms were barely superiour to a sword an
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By the time the Bill of Rights was written, the Founding Fathers had seen the invention of the first machine gun and had personally issues a 22-round "semi-automatic" rifle to Lewis & Clark for their famous expedition. To claim that "they didn't intend for modern weapons" to be covered by the Second Amendment is absurd. They knew exactly where guns were going (which, in all reality, guns haven't changed much in the past century) and they wanted to ensure that the people had the means to fight back aga
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The Bill of Rights (ten of the amendments, at least) were ratified by the end of 1791. The Lewis and Clark expedition was because of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Guns that could fire more than once, once loaded, were pretty old, but the first automatically loading guns were mid-19th Century, and I don't think anything less can be called a "machine gun".
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Girandoni air rifle: self-loading (with the gun tipped up), one shot at a time. Roughly equivalent to the bolt-action rifles that equipped most armies in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Not to be confused with a machine gun. Puckle gun: closer to an externally powered automatic rifle, having 11-round clips that could be put in and fired fast. Neither had the features of anything anybody would describe now as a machine gun, which would at least mean being able to fire numerous bullets with on
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Email on a cloud provider server? That's taking candy from a baby, they've probably already cashed their check from the NSA.
ha ha ha check from the NSA. The only check the NSA gives you is whether you're complying with their illegal demands not to inform the populace as to what they're doing, so they can see if you should be carted off to the gulag
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So, you are saying that China and Japan rule?
If foreign governments read my private emails... (Score:2)
I'll never get a visa from anybody.
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well, there's always mastercharge and bank americard.
(wait - what year is this, again?)
Hiding evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
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Their analogy also fits how I personally think the case should be resolved. The court seems to be unsure about the personal access of Microsoft's American staff though. In your example, a U.S.-based employee has to be ordered to comply with the German subpoena. But it sounds like in this case, Microsoft's U.S. employees can comply with the subpoena fully themselves, without having to order Microsoft Ireland employees to assist. So the court seems to be leaning towards thinking that in that case, as corporat
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I'm just surprised that hasn't happened yet. They are probably building the office now.
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So Microsoft US employees, or at least some of them, seem to have direct access to worldwide Microsoft data.
And quite probably the other way around, this would create hell on all forms of international access/accounts as the Germans would find a person working for Microsoft Germany who'd be compelled to access documents on US servers in violation of US law. Let's also not forget that even if you're in your own country and relatively safe you are committing a crime abroad, which could be nasty if you ever decide to go on holidays to a country that has an extradition agreement with that country. Also, if you know p
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That's true, but seems pretty similar to the case where you have e.g. multiple physical copies of a document. What happens if a document is photocopied, and both Microsoft's Seattle office, and Microsoft's Dublin office, have a copy of the document? My understanding of traditional subpoena law is that either country could subpoena the document in this case, even if it were considered privileged or private data under the law of the other country.
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That is the point.
If the US court wants this data it needs to subpoena the document in an IRISH court and have the Irish division of Microsoft (which operates under Irish law) deliver it.
The current situation is that the US court wants to compel a company (owned by a US company) that is based and operated in Ireland to do something that may break Irish law.
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They're not trying to compel Microsoft Ireland to do anything though: they're trying to compel Microsoft U.S. to retrieve the data and turn it over to the court. Since Microsoft U.S. has access to the data, they are able to do that. If Microsoft Ireland were firewalled off so U.S. employees could not access Ireland data, it wouldn't be an issue.
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Does the argument change that much if they order a person from the German branch to travel to America to rummage through the deposit box?
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What if the person from the German branch doesn't have to travel to America?
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If a North Korean Lockheed employee has access to the F-22 Raptor designs, I have no doubt that a North Korean court could compel him/her to turn them over. My guess is that Lockheed's NK-based employees do not have access to the F-22 Raptor designs precisely for that reason.
Re:Hiding evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
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. ... THEN it would be equivalent.
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
Lets compare apples to apples.
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You have failed to understand the analogy.
Deutsche Bank = Microsoft
Branch = servers in Ireland
New York Times = EU citizens using servers in EU
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You have failed to understand the analogy.
Deutsche Bank = Microsoft
Branch = servers in Ireland
New York Times = EU citizens using servers in EU
I got the first 2 items.
But what makes us confident the 3rd item holds true? I admit I orginally was under the mistaken impression that the warrant was for Microsofts own email documents that they'd stored in Ireland; and I see that was mistaken.
But do we actually know that the warrant is for an EU citizen, using servers in EU?
If so, then yes, I'm with you. That is qu
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That's an even more dangerous line of thinking. It would result in every major corporation in the U.S. immediately moving their HQ to a more warrant-friendly country and reincorporating there. Your
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But in our modern networked world, it is now possible to do things outside the country you are in. I can now gamble in Macau over the Internet from the comfort of my living room. Physical location is no longer adequate to determine jurisdiction. It hasn't happened yet, but eventually some hacker is going to mess up some hospital's ICU computers in another country and kill someone. This issue needs to be resolved somehow by the International community in a manner which is consistent and reciprocal without being destructive.
The way to handle that is easy: Send a request for administrative assistance to Ireland, and then an irish judge will decide if Microsoft Ireland has to comply.
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I'm not actually certain that the US recognizes any other nations laws as superceding theirs. If a US citizen commits some crime in another country they can still be held accountable for it here in a US court of law. The easiest example that I can think of is some guy who got married and went on a honeymoon in australia where he is accused of murdering his wife by disconnecting her oxygen supply while scuba diving. He was prosecuted both in Australia and here in the states. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
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If the New York branch manager is required to follow German orders through normal means, I don't actually see any inconsistency in the rebuttal. The Deutsche Bank branch acts as an agent of the Deutsche Bank, and is subject to the laws of the countries in which Deutsche Bank operates - probably many at once, and probably even some in conflict.
It is the responsibility of the corporation to ensure that its legal boundaries are determined by its establishment. Perhaps Deutsche Bank is merely an investor in an
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"And what do you think of MS's rebuttal of that position?"
I think that an analogy that dissimilar in the essential point is not instructive.
The US Government is not sending any orders to any entity outside of the US.
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The rebuttal described by Microsoft doesn't involve the German government sending any orders to any entity outside of Germany either. This is the relevant quote from the article:
Germany’s Foreign Minister responds: “We did not conduct an extraterritorial search – in fact we didn’t search anything at all. No German officer ever set foot in the United States. The Stadtpolizei merely ordered a German company to produce its own business records, which were in its own possession, custody, and control. The American reporter’s privacy interests were fully protected, because the Stadtpolizei secured a warrant from a neutral magistrate.”
"[N]o way would that response satisfy the U.S. Government” because the documents held by the foreign company for safekeeping are private letters, not business records. And any attempt to take possession of those letters through a warrant – even one served on the company entrusted with those letters – would constitute a seizure by a foreign government of private information located in another country.
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That's exactly what I'm thinking. A US court can subpoena stuff from US citizens, or people in the US. It can't compel an Irish citizen in Ireland to do a thing. Therefore, if a US resident can provide something, a US court can subpoena it. If it requires somebody in Ireland to do something like load a tape, then the US court cannot require it. It may be able to force Microsoft US to request the data from Microsoft Ireland, but if Microsoft Ireland says "No, we legally can't do that", then it seems to
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They are trying compel Microsoft US to provide evidence that it has already stipulated that it has access to. The fact that a multinational running multiple subdivisions in order to play fast and loose with national laws may end up being hoist by its own petard is not the problem of either the US government or the Irish government.
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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"
Comparing an email account to a safe deposit box seems more than a little disingenuous because any free email service provider will make it clear as day that "your" information is theirs to do what they please with.
Anything in this privacy statement that the law does not require is just a PROMISE, and they can change their terms on a whim. They SAY "your content" but what puts them in the position to dictate the terms? Read "We may" and "We will not" as "We can"
http://www.microsoft.com/priva... [microsoft.com]
"We may sha
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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.
I could buy this analogy if the email originates in the U.S. or is destined for and accessed by a person within the U.S. But if neither circumstance applies, then like the airmail scenario the U.S. would have no reasonable jurisdiction.
Not legal (Score:2)
I could buy this analogy if the email originates in the U.S. or is destined for and accessed by a person within the U.S. But if neither circumstance applies, then like the airmail scenario the U.S. would have no reasonable jurisdiction.
Yes they would if the document was under subpoena. If you mail the document before it is subject to a request for it then you might (emphasis might) be ok, but once the document becomes relevant to a court proceeding you are obligated to produce it AND to ensure that it remains producible. If you mail away or destroy a document then the court generally has the right to treat that action as incriminating. And well they should otherwise everyone could simply destroy any document or mail them away to avoid
Re:Hiding evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
The problem with that assessment is that hindsight is 20/20. This is exactly like the radioactive cosmetics of the early 20th century. People gave radium and other such substances quasi-magical properties, but few, even scientists, suspected the damage. There was no way for you as a consumer to know that the product you were using could be dangerous. In the case of radium, there were enough quick deaths that the link was made publicly and usage fell, but for tobacco the side-effects took much longer and wer
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Let's look at it this way.
Say, for instance, it has been suggested a popular soft drink gave you cancer. The company who make the drink have investigated this, found it to be true, but are spending millions covering up, denying and rubbishing the suggestions. We're talking a massive scale lie and fraud here. They are being so successful at doing this that you are convinced, and are happily continuing to consume the drink. You've got a can of it by your computer right now.
A few years from now you're goin
You see it wrong (Score:3)
But they did. They paid and sponsored programs to show smoking happy people, you couple in love, or "heroes" all lighting cigarettes. Never sponsored a program showing you a 50-70 guy dying horribly of cancer. They influenced the culture to to make people smoke more and more, all the while knowing they were sending death sentences down the line. WITHOUT that cultural influence,a dvertisin
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One of the ways the tobacco industry censored the truth was through advertising in magazines and newspapers. If you go to the library and look through consumer magazines from the 1970s, you can find magazines where 75% of the ads are for cigarettes.
People have studied the content of the magazines, and for the most part, publications with cigarette advertising never published anything about the harms of smoking. Generally speaking, when a publication runs a story that's unfavorable to a product, they let the
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Lets put common sense on it. Anyone with half a clue, especially a smoker realizes when they get up in the morning after smoking for any period of time that its not good for you. You have to be an idiot to not understand what it does to you, and you are a complete moron if you believe what some company selling you a product says. You can potentially ignore that it causes cancer out of ignorance, but cancer is really not the biggest problem with smoking from a health perspective.
Yes, they made it intentio
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Let's put common sense in this. Nobody has internal senses so accurate that they can tell what something is really doing to their body. Lots of people realized that smoking was not good for them, but they couldn't make an informed decision as to how bad it was, and how important to stop. When they made an uninformed decision because the information wasn't available, that's one thing. When they couldn't make an informed decision because the information was suppressed by the cigarette companies, that's a
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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.
Your metaphor is off. It isn't about the court compelling you to produce the document, it's about compelling the foreign confederate to produce the document.
In this case I think the US courts should have some mechanism for petitioning the Irish courts to allow them to perform the search. Justice is still served, but each country still maintains its sovereignty.
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But in this case it's not a confederate that has the data. The servers in Ireland belong to Microsoft, not another company. Let's reduce it to a simpler case: A sues B in state court in state 1 (A lives in state 1, B is based there and the offense involved occurred there so state 1 has jurisdiction over the case). B stores older documents in a warehouse
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But in this case it's not a confederate that has the data. The servers in Ireland belong to Microsoft, not another company. Let's reduce it to a simpler case: A sues B in state court in state 1 (A lives in state 1, B is based there and the offense involved occurred there so state 1 has jurisdiction over the case). B stores older documents in a warehouse it owns in state 2. A shows that B has documents relevant to the case and that they're in that warehouse. Can the state court judge order B to produce those documents even though the documents aren't in the judge's physical jurisdiction, or must the judge punt the case to Federal court or a court in state 2 and have them handle that? My sense is that the judge can order B to produce the documents and B would be obliged to comply. If B refuses to comply then A would probably have to go through a court in state 2 if they wanted deputies to go in and seize the documents, but wouldn't if they merely wanted B sanctioned for failure to comply with the court's order.
I suspect the situation here would turn on whether or not Microsoft's operations in Ireland are a legally independent entity that could legally refuse to do what Microsoft tells it to do. I suspect Microsoft's Irish operations walk a very fine line, trying to be independent enough not to be subject to US tax laws but without being independent enough to actually be able to act independently of Microsoft.
The problem with this model is you're trying to determine if MS is an American company, an Irish company, or something else. A difficult question considering the games that corporations play with their charters.
And the chain of command doesn't necessarily resolve things. If every subdivision has someone with the authority to view the emails do courts from every country get to access them? Does it matter where the CEO or the relevant VP lives? And while MS is incorporated in the US a lot of big corporations
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This isn't similar at all. The information was always outside of the country and kept there, as such the US has no jurisdiction. Just like if someone sent you a letter to your address in Ireland they could not claim jurisdiction over that letter, if they wanted to produce a court order for the letter they would need to do so via Irelands courts (which they can of course do). The US is trying to bypass due process, this will backfire on them and backfire badly as other countries will use it as a precedent to
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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.
IANAL but that would seem to be a different situation: If the court requests a document you have and then you mail it to your overseas confederate, then I think you'll be on the hook for something like obstruction of justice.
But if you mail your confederate a document, then later the court requests you to produce it, you can tell them "That's the property of Confederate, who are a different entity. You'll need to request it from them."
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Who said the data had anything to do with US operations?
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Except this is data on Irish servers, about people who aren't Americans, and covered under applicable Irish laws.
American law has no jurisdiction there, and America can't just act like their laws apply anywhere in the world.
And, what you have to remember about "MS, being a corporation incorporated in the US" is that the Microsoft which operates in Ireland is a separate corporation incorporated under Irish law.
The fact that there is another corporation operating in the US called Microsoft doesn't mean the US
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Correct. The fact that the document was once in a letter does not make it private. As soon as the government does not snoop in the mails/emails while in transit, everything is fair game once it has reached its destination.
So, what MS is saying is... (Score:3, Insightful)
...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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Read the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment does not mention geography, and uses the words "people" and "person" instead of "citizen".
So let's have end-to-end encryption (Score:2)
and be done with these silly arguments.
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The US Is Like Fantasia (Score:5, Interesting)
[G'mork laughs and Atreyu gets a little angry]
Atreyu: What's so funny about that?
G'mork: Fantasia has no boundaries.
hypocrisy (Score:2)
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.
And yet the government can complain. The government has no problem not being a hypocrite (if you have any doubt on this, go ahead and look at the multitude of trade agreements we have).
Also, lawyers and Microsoft combining to call the government a hypocrite? This is like a cesspool of double standards, each trying to be the worst.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, lawyers and Microsoft combining to call the government a hypocrite? This is like a cesspool of double standards, each trying to be the worst.
The really big problem Microsoft has (and numerous other large US companies that run cloud services with datacenters in the EU, such as Amazon and IBM) is that if they give in with this, there will be lots of EU customers who will leave as soon as possible, and nothing that they'll be able to say or do will stop it short of relocating the company HQ and ownership structure entirely outside the US so the US government and courts really won't have jurisdiction (but will instead have to work through internatio
Bill Gates is NOT a constitutional scholar (Score:2)
Obama is. So who do you trust?
Ibid (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Proton Mail (Score:2)
Just wondering if anyone has used this?
https://protonmail.ch/ [protonmail.ch]
It promises end to end encryption - and they don't have the encryption key. So if Uncle Sam comes knocking they have nothing for him :-)
Re: (Score:2)
... you just gotta live with the fact that someone somewhere is going to be in control of your data. you have to trust them to do what they're saying.
Microsoft says the US wants a pony. (Score:2)
Since the US government is not ordering a search outside of the US, why should we listen to any other claim that Microsoft US makes after that point?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Last I checked, Ireland was not part of the US.
What?!?! (Score:3)
The solution is simple (Score:2)
stop outsourcing your dirty laundry if you don't want anyone to see your tread marks in your tighty whities.
You gave up your privacy when you put your data on someone else servers. I'm not saying it should be legal for the government to claim it in any shape or form, domestic or foreign, but when you put your data on someone else servers you already gave up your security.
Ireland is a tax haven for corporations (Score:2)
It's a
Re: (Score:2)
Your argument would hold more water if it wasn't the US government's idea for Ireland to become a tax haven in the first place:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money... [npr.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Your argument would hold more water if it wasn't the US government's idea for Ireland to become a tax haven in the first place:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money... [npr.org]
Nonsense. Just because a US consultant in Ireland mentioned Puerto Rico's economic successes in passing, does not equal an endorsement of US tax evasion by the American government. And even if the US government agrees with the "Double Irish" (actually this loophole is being closed in a few years), it doesn't mean that the American people would endorse having their money funneled into private corporations that don't even pay taxes. There are plenty of other small countries getting rich through economic injus
Re: (Score:2)
"Just because a US consultant in Ireland mentioned Puerto Rico's economic successes in passing, does not equal an endorsement of US tax evasion by the American government."
If the state department didn't think it was a good idea it probably shouldn't have been in the report recommending economic stimulus for Ireland, no?
"It's amazing to me how American society will look with suspicion at anything the federal government does, but give corporations a pass for taking and giving nothing back at all."
This is the
Re: (Score:2)
Apple could certainly pay more tax than they do (and I would totally support legal changes to require that), but to call $5.3 billion [nytimes.com] "nothing" is a bit of a stretch.
MS fighting the good fight (Score:2)
How the times have changed.
Operative word: "Taking" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hardly. But they can still be better than those they're regulating.
Re: (Score:2)
He did. We are all hoping for a change to occur.
Re: (Score:3)
There actually is a treaty that would allow prosecutors to go to a Irish court and get a search warrant. Why they haven't done so, nobody knows (though I suspect the standards of probable cause are stricter in Ireland).
Re: (Score:2)
So Microsoft are ALSO hypocrites. That's no surprise. But whose records are to be produced? If they are those of an EU citizen, then I don't see the US govt. has reasonable grounds. If they are those of an international corporation, then... What if they are those of a foreign government?
I tend to think that MS is correct here...I'm just not sure (possibly because the idea that MS could ever be correct sticks in my throat).
Re: (Score:2)
Excellent summary of the problem with all things "cloud"! (Private clouds that _you_ own and operate being the sole exception.)