Not defending MS at all but what is the alternative for them? What people want is the judicial oversight. But can Microsoft really go to a court and say "hey judge, we're Microsoft, we want a warrant for Microsoft to provide this"?
When you act rightfully, it is never wasting time of the legal system!
Because I can do something (without asking anybody else) it needs not to be right!
In this case, it really would be a waste of time. Microsoft wouldn't be seeking a subpoena, nor are they a government seeking a warrant. Microsoft would just be asking the court for permission to do something the court cannot grant.
There's no legal question, unless say, someone were to sue Microsoft for accessing their data.
So I disagree with your statement, at least in my country it would be not wasting anything ... but DOING THE RIGHT THING!
And I would really wonder, if in the US the landlord could just search your house, because he thinks that you might have stolen something of him -- with the argument, that he does not want to "waste anybodies time"!
Others have pointed out that this is a clear way in which cloud storage is fundamentally different from local storage, which one might not expect -- being able to be secure in one's papers, a fundamental right in the US, only pertains if the papers are physically located on your person or property.
I'm overextending here, but I think the physical analogy applies as well -- if the police want to search a rented storage locker, the search warrant is served to the storage company, not the lessee of the locker.
If this is the case: I don't think, that many companies are aware of this. But that would render the worth of online services to void for many companies.
Or are we living in a world of morons?
If you have information you want to keep private or secure, it's your responsibility to ensure that it private or secure. This means understanding the agreements you make when you store said data in certain locations.
> I don't think, that many companies are aware of this.
No, many companies are in fact aware of this. This is the reason there providers that do provide increased security and oversight as far as data access goes. Apple, Google, and Microsoft just happen to provide free email services that aren't that secure if you violate their T&C.
> than cloud storage and any online service of vital documents is just impossible in the US.
Yeah, if you think using a cloud service outside the US immediately makes you immune to these problems, you are the one who isn't aware of the situation.
If you read my statements carefully, I did not say that. But in my country there are different laws and I know that many cloud service providers do not have privacy holes as Hotmail has in their legal statements.
I also said, that I don't know how the law in the US is, but some statements here made the impression, that companies like MS could just do what they want.
That would have been the correct way to do it.
Whether or not we agree with the law is a separate matter from whether or not a crime was committed -- which they had reasonable suspicion to believe it was. Therefore, they should have gone in front of a judge for a warrant.
I agree that if they have to do this investigation (and really they're the ones that will ultimately decide that) they shouldn't get anyone else involved - especially the criminal justice system.
I think what I'm trying to get at is that the conversation is turning here toward just how should Microsoft access the data they want, when it should be whether they should be able to at all. I don't like the idea that it's a given that they can take that information, and that's what should change here.
Key here is that Microsoft is not searching itself. Content of the email account does not belong to Microsoft, it belongs to the user. To search it Microsoft needs explicit permission of user or law enforcement agency.
If you are actually stupid enough to leak trade secrets for Microsoft's premiere product, while using Hotmail to do it, well you really deserve what you get.
verb 1. justify or necessitate (a certain course of action).
Where "judge" is proxy for a nominally impartial third party who nominally has the experience to make an informed decision which reasonably protects the interests of both parties, the public interest, and our stated commitments to civil liberties. And we already make routine use of judges for this function in cases where the data or other artifacts are not possessed by the party who wants extraordinary permission to access them.
But just think if they had filed a civil suit and gone to court for discovery of information that they had possession of but conceivably not the right to - they could have created a nice legal precedent and ended up being lauded by the EFF!
Yes. They want people to use their products, don't they? I'm not going to spend money on a product that gives me zero assurance that I have control of my information.
The EFF suggests getting the FBI involved and having them serve a court-approved warrant, but that doesn't work if you want to keep this a purely civil process and not involve the police (and given recent abuse of police powers for relatively minor crimes, getting the FBI involved is probably not something to be categorically encouraged).