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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft deserves most of the criticism it has received over the years, but in this case it deserves a pat on the back.

It is not easy to stand up to the US government. Many smaller firms do not have the clout nor the funds to do so.

In making this stand, it will hopefully set a legal precedent, to make sure that the USG abide by the rules of international law.

Here is the EFF's opinion on the matter: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/eff-applauds-apples-re...

Microsoft are not the only company batlling with the USG over user privacy, Apple (iMessage and other user data) is also making a stand: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/us/politics/apple-and-othe...

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I suspect that for organisations like Microsoft and Apple it's about profitability. If they can't protect their non-US clients' data they stand to lose those clients. That loss must surely be greater than the legal cost of "standing up to the US government".

All corporations have a primary responsibility to benefit their shareholders. That they can combine it with a noble cause is an added bonus.

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.

That national governments spy on their citizens and each other is immaterial. If cloud providers cannot adhere to the EU data protection directive, EU organisations will be legally bound to find services that can.

> All corporations have a primary responsibility to benefit their shareholders.

This is false. The mission statement of the company lays out its responsibility and what shareholders can expect. Shareholders choose to invest or not. A not-for-profit company is an example.

A not for profit company still benefits the shareholders. The benefit is just not monetary.

That's not the definition of 'benefit' that junto was using. Let's focus on claims, not wording.

> Quite honestly, I don't think they would lose that many clients.

You're underestimating the amount of industrial espionage that the U.S. does to favour its multinational corps. MS, Apple et al. were fine to benefit from the fragments this might bring them when it was a fairly well guarded secret and it was assumed that the U.S. was on relatively equal footing with other countries such as France, UK, Germany, Japan in this regard. The Snowden leaks show that the NSA capacity is a couple orders of magnitude larger than any other country and suddenly the U.S. players would lose more business through distrust than they would gain through government espionage.

You're saying the parent is underestimating, and yet you provide zero proof of that underestimation. Without anything to go on, in regards that Microsoft or Apple (et al) benefit from NSA or similar derived industrial espionage, you're just slandering them with empty accusations.

All corporations have a primary responsibility to benefit their shareholders.

Wandering off-topic as I am, that's just an opinion that gained ground in the seventies. Not everyone thinks it's a good idea and with any luck it'll die eventually.

An episode of the Cybersecurity Podcast with Peter Singer was recently talking about the Snowden leaks and how the west coast (Apple, Microsoft, et. al.) had to go to the east coast (Washington, Pentagon) and tell them to stop saying that the government spying was only on non-US citizens and foreigners since that demographic is still the vast majority of their business.

> I suspect that for organisations like Microsoft and Apple it's about profitability.

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

At the end society is build on cost-vs-benefit calculations, while you might not steal a car because it's morally wrong you most likely do so because you don't want to go to prison, if government could enforce internet piracy on any reasonable level whether you support file sharing or not you wouldn't be downloading anything if it meant getting a 100,000 fine a week later either.

Yahoo put up a fight but backed down when threatened with an infinitely large fine. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&o... They also released 1,500 pages of secret-court filings. http://yahoopolicy.tumblr.com/post/97238899258/shedding-ligh...

I find it hard to believe the USG wasn't bluffing. There's no way Yahoo could hide a $250 per day fine on the balance sheets, and the government would not want that disclosed.

Other companies as well as individuals paid similar fines, the fine is usually put on a "contempt of court" charge rather than on the actual case being brought up, so no they weren't really bluffing.

Yahoo mentioned that they didn't believe the Supreme Court would uphold it either, but that's still not a gamble they want to take.

There's no way Yahoo could hide a $250 per day fine on the balance sheets,

    $250 * 365 = $91250

Yahoo's latest quarterly revenue was a little over 1.2 billion dollars[0]. A little over $90k listed under "court fees" would probably not cause anyone to blink an eye.

[0] - https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:YHOO&fstype=ii

drjesusphd misread or mistyped - It was $250,000 per day. And there was a clause that would have caused it to be much higher. Check the article.

To be fair, responding to a warrant for stored information and installing a backdoor in your software are two pretty different matzah balls.

If the servers in question were on US soil, Microsoft would comply with the warrant in about a second and a half. They're not "sticking it to the man, man" by refusing this particular request. It's just a question of legality.

Absolutely. For anyone to believe otherwise is a bit ridiculous, especially considering how this same company has built backdoors for the very same government into their flagship products over the years. Microsoft is just crossing t's and dotting i's. Nothing to see here.

Especially when it could be so easy for Apple to comply and nobody would suspect a thing:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/09/lets-talk-ab...

Unless of course the whole article was meant to make everyone think how much Apple cares about your privacy, a day before the new iPhone is launched, and for law enforcement people to mislead people into thinking using iMessage can protect them.

Yeah, and when Apple updated their TOS to address "security concerns", their warrant canary disappeared and reading between the lines they admit to giving away user data to the government. Something about "we follow the law to protect our users - your data is safe".

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