Microsoft battles US over warrant for drugs case emails

Quite honestly, I don't think they would lose that many clients. The USG has been trampling over the rights of non-US citizens for years. Snowden's leaks showed just how bad that is. The truth is that the vast majority of those people don't care enough to do anything about it.

Even people who do care (and are technologically minded) still have their Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts and online file storage. The effort required to change is greater than the threat to their privacy.

That will not change until the loss of their privacy actually has a visible and impactful effect upon those people. I.e. people start being persecuted by the government for their beliefs or actions in private.

Modern western government's are too smart for that though. Those kind of non-subtle sledgehammer tactics don't work in a society where bad publicity can't be controlled. As an example, see the UK government's U-turn on immigration policy after the public's reaction to a photo of a two year old drowned immigrants's child on a Greek beach laying face down in the waves.

So? The relative freedom of modern democracy is significantly tied up in the rise of independent merchant/commercial classes.

1) The Feds do have guns, but Microsoft has an extraordinary amount of goodwill, and media connections, and political connections, the foremost being the POTUS. He would not dare piss off one of the most powerful corporations in the world and risk the ensuing media malestrom that would have heads rolling from his office on down. They say our goverment has 3 branches, but it really has 4, the 4th being the intensely powerful news and internet media, which microsoft's tentacles even today spread very deep, and from which all politicians draw their votes. If it came to this, the president would face increasing scrutiny and actions of congress to block whatever he wanted to do (especially a republican congress) in order to save their own ass.

2) All these other agencies are enforcement angencies and fall under the jurisdiction of the POTUS. They would not act quickly (and would have to follow legal procedure, it's not as if these orgs just jump when the president says "sick em boy").

I would not choose to continue making money and pleasing shareholders if it meant abetting the government in what they're demonstrating they're intent on pursuing.

It would be the end of Microsoft within 5 minutes. I'd be out of the country along with the Men (and Women of principles) that helped me pulverize it within 5 minutes.

There's always a way to do it. They could do it and put the government in its place. But no one thinks they are man enough to do it, and so it doesn't get done.