Microsoft is suing federal officials for the right to be able to tell customers when law enforcement officials request their emails and other data, the latest instance of a Silicon Valley giant settling in for a battle with the government over privacy issues. The lawsuit, filed yesterday, insists that consumers have a right to know when the government requests to read their emails and Microsoft should have the right to inform users when the government is doing so. This amendment ensured the right of people and businesses to be aware when the government searches through their property.
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Spokeswoman Emily Pierce said that the Department of Justice is reviewing the filing.
Microsoft’s suit focuses on the storage of data on remote servers, rather than locally on people’s computers, which Microsoft says has provided a new opening for the government to access electronic data. According to privacy advocates, the Act itself is thirty years old and was established before the rise of Internet making it possibly outdated.
“People do not give up their rights when they move their private information from physical storage to the cloud”, the suit says.
It also adds that this legal mechanism breaches the First Amendment, “which enshrines Microsoft’s rights to talk to its customers and discuss how the government conducts its investigations”.
Microsoft has joined the battle against the US Government after Apple was asked to write software to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters from the massacre in San Bernardino, California.
Under current law, the government has the right to demand access to customer information, while also issuing orders to companies such as Microsoft to keep these types of legal demands secret. Over the past 18 months, the USA government has required that we maintain secrecy regarding 2,576 legal demands, effectively silencing Microsoft from speaking to customers about warrants or other legal process seeking their data.
This is the company’s fourth lawsuit against the federal government over digital privacy since Edward Snowden’s disclosures. Notably and even surprisingly, 1,752 of these secrecy orders, or 68 percent of the total, contained no fixed end date at all. The lawsuit follows a high profile case that partially played out between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over encryption and whether or not tech firms should be forced to help law enforcement agencies break into electronic devices.
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Microsoft’s lawsuit comes a day after a USA congressional panel voted unanimously to advance a package of reforms to the ECPA.
