Microsoft exec: Targeting of Americans’ records ‘routine’
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
> Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.
> “Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.
Congress was spied on, a US presidential candidate that we know of was spied on... So imagine plain old American citizens... what can we expect?
If congress isn't willing to take back what they allowed, they aren't going to stop all by themselves. If congress tried, they'd get a lot of pushback. Just like the Armed forces would push back on a spending cut back even though the cold war ended over 30 years ago and our budget dwarfs any one else's.
But you see that same phenomenon in run of the mill operations like homelessness non-profits. Their heft and momentum keeps them going and if you wanted to dismantle them they'd put up a big fight and tell you that while homelessness has gotten worse without them it would be doubly worse even though they never made it better to begin with but their directors live well.
US defense spending was 3.4% of GDP in 2019. Quite possibly it jumped in 2020 as GDP dropped, but over 4% seems unlikely. (Still, in the ballpark and good context, I think your comment added to the discussion.)
Compare that to GDP % which would indicate a steady decline in spending. So now we very much do have to examine GDP here in order to look at the argument specifics if we care about 1982-1990. With that said, the cold war ended around 1991, so the military stagnation is more or less in line with the cold war ending. The context missing on the original claim is simply that spending shot right back up once American mucked up and got itself stuck in the middle east, being involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
But hey, none of this relates to the original post at all really - that claim was not actually doing any lifting in the original argument other than to serve as a light illustration of how the military spending is never cut in a significant way, and that is generally true save a small exception from 2011-2015. The best that can happen is an effective slow cut through stagnation. And all of THAT is just to say that the government gets pushback when trying to walk back policies.
So did it ever really matter how the cold war affected spending here? What's the point of calling this super nuance out?
Again, I think you're missing the point. The very specific, non relevant way you interpreted the claim is factually wrong.
To me, the claim read as:
> the military spending is never cut in a significant way
Which again, at an absolute level, is generally true when looking at inflation adjusted spending. Within context, absolute is relevant here though as this is about government process. The whole context makes this claim incredibly tangential to the whole point, which more or less boils down to "government has a lot of inertia".
> doesn't change the fact the poster is wrong
Again, did it ever really matter how the cold war affected spending here? What's the point of calling this super nuance out? My point is not to argue about 1990-2000 military spending and the measures of it.
I'm calling this out to say "arguing over small irrelevant details to an argument is not very productive if you care about the real topic at hand".
Are you trying to make this case because you believe that the government does not have a lot of inertia when it comes to these things? Great, then make that case instead of this rabbit hole. Or is this rabbit hole just about the non relevant fact itself?
And then you read something like this. All those abstract privacy concerns just got a bit more concrete...
...maybe they know that people are installing root kits... because they see first hand what the "good" guys are doing routinely.
It is solving the problem of unauthorised rootkits.
And jail cells are just very secure apartments. There's always going to be a guard around to let you out, why is everyone freaking out?
I wonder what requests Microsoft considers too far, considering they seem to have been willing to give up politician and journalist data. I wonder of they received a request for information on Gates and if so how they replied to it.
> The United States does not have a British-style Official Secrets Act; instead, several laws protect classified information, including the Espionage Act of 1917, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.[1]
The ALCU has a bunch of work[2] on this if you want to dig deeper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_...
Nice for one stop shopping
> “Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.
So it's mostly communications data stored in the cloud. We know Apple and Google receive similar requests because they also release data:
https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html (US: 4600 devices in Jan-Jul 2021)
https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=... (US: about 60,000 in 2019)
No probable cause is required.
Eek! These illegal violations of privacy must stop now that congressman and their staffers are being surveilled too!
Have you considered for a moment that NSA and CIA have the phone numbers and location track logs of every mistress, hooker, and drug dealer used by every member of congress?
DKE should not be confused with any other BYOK service, where you only manage the key, but host it on Azure so MS still has access to you private key.
I think there could be middle ground where customers could select a set of metadata that they are willing to share with the cloud provider or even better, select only the sensitive parts of the document that must be encrypted with their own key.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/do...