The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power.
And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand.
Agreed. Hopefully this encourages more people to stand up to unreasonable violations of privacy from our government.
> And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand.
The question of whether a company is following principles or motivated by profit/PR is so strange to me. The question is nonsense and the answer irrelevant.
Microsoft is not a person with principles. It's 90,000ish people with different principles. I'm sure some people really believe in the right to privacy, some want to avoid angering customers, some don't care, etc. The reasons and motivations behind a company's actions are as diverse as the actors involved.
We could argue about motivations all day, like the responses to your comment are doing, but it's pointless and irrelevant. Unless you want to hone in and talk about individual people there's no answer to the question, and we're just trading vague meaningless opinions. It's like arguing whether a mountain is rocky or sandy. Chances are that I can find both, so we should either get more specific or talk about averaging via a survey. It happened, and the results are the same.
If a company I liked did this would I think it's a good thing?If so, it's probably a good thing.
No, they really aren't. It's not even true for a democracy, where "we the people" get to vote for a small elite, which in turns will enact laws taking into account lobbying pressure, pressure from political allies, personal interests, likelihood of being re-elected, and occasionally the interest of the people and personal convictions.
A company, especially at this size, is not a democracy. Maybe the janitor believes in privacy, and the clerk trusts the government, but at the end of the day, strategic decisions like this one rest in the hand of a small group at the top. Some of them may occasionally put their principles before "shareholder value" or "next week's bonus", but it looks pretty rare in practice.
Are we truly that insane ?
Wasn't the whole problem with "spying" that there wasn't judicial oversight ? Here we have a case where federal prosecutors went for judicial oversight, were put in the right by a judge. Isn't that exactly what you'd want ?
Laughable comment in the article:
> Let there be no doubt that Microsoft's actions in this controversial case are customer-centric.
Really ? Have we truly forgotten this quickly what happened ?
http://thehackernews.com/2014/03/microsoft-admits-spying-on-...
Btw : keep in mind that this case is also about setting precedent. That is why both parties want it to go to appeal, and don't care about the outcome of this particular trial. It is beside the point. Both the US federal police and Microsoft want the American justice system to decide this issue, and well, the current judge can't make that decision (well, technically it wouldn't be final).
So keep in mind this judge is mostly doing the minimum her job requires and trying to be home in time for dinner here. There is no decision made, nothing like what the article claims has happened, legally speaking.
There was judical oversight... the FISC... aka the rubber stamp
That is the problem with the judiciary today, they have abandoned their responsibility to be a check on government power and instead take the government at their word and rubber stamp everything unless there some defense (which is often not even allowed as these orders are given ex parte in many cases) proves they should be denied
A company, as an organization, can be intelligent or stupid, creative or conservative; it can have social intelligence (Facebook), or it can never get it right with people, but be an excellent engineer (Google). So I don't see why we shouldn't treat an organization as being moral, or immoral, humane or inhumane. By these lines, it's certainly a valid question whether Microsoft is showing character, and high moral standards, or is it simply doing it for personal gain.
I work for a company very similar to Microsoft. If this happened to us, we would do the same thing, for the very same reason.
We would lose every Cloud customer from another country immediately if this was followed. All our work investing and building data centers in the world would be wasted. Companies would pull away all contracts for Cloud work, and we would gain no new ones. It would be the end of the Enterprise Cloud.
That being said, have Microsoft's past mistakes been too big that (what some consider) the good behavior exhibited lately regarding privacy issues is a drop of pure water in an ocean of oil? I'm not implying anything, just asking to provoke thinking.
Can people change? Can large companies change their character? Is Microsoft changing or we are seeing some schizophrenic good actions lately? Food for thought :)
That said, why would you be surprised that the same governments happily collaborating with the NSA wouldn't do anything about privacy? We're pretty lucky as it is to have a privacy protection law at all.
In this case, EU data-privacy laws emerged as a way to harmonize EU trade and law enforcement practices. They were then made compatible with US laws through various international agreements and treaties. Things were working, more or less.
Then the US Congress passed the PATRIOT Act in haste, and broke everything. It took years to sketch out a way to make these incompatible laws work together, sort of. Grey areas were swept under the carpet, in hope that particular circumstances they covered "would never happen". Now they are happening, due to a combination of factors (the emergence of cloud computing, NSA revelations, differences in foreign policy stances, etc).
Until Microsoft keeps this stance and the US legal landscape allows them to, EU governments simply don't have to do anything - the Data Protection Directive holds, US law enforcement yields. If MS is actually forced to hand over the data, then a response will be required from our side of the pond.
That may change more swiftly than you imagine. It seems like the US is already far more reluctant than ten years ago to go rushing in.
In the grand scheme of things, EU defense relies immensely on US forces and there are no signs that this is going to change anytime soon. The UK is struggling to just maintain capability, let alone expand it to replace allied resources. The French are now 100% integrated in NATO and have enough on their plate by caring for their African ex-colonies anyway. Italy and Spain can't pay state pensions, let alone expanding their military. The only country with some spare capacity would be Germany, which cannot do it for historical and political reasons.
In fact, what the Ukraine crisis is showing is how Europe still cannot say no to the US in security matters: it was the US administration that pushed for escalating Maidan (remember "fuck the EU"?), it was the US administration that pushed for sanctions (with Europeans going along grudgingly) and it's the closest US allies (UK, Poland) who are now leading the charge for further escalation... and finding no formal opposition, despite plenty of grumbling across the continent. Because in practice, nobody can afford to lose their US umbrella.
Why not? Surely Europe doesn't want to set a precedent that Russia can foment and fund an "opposition", claim the existence of such an opposition means that the territory it is in should be annexed, and then annex it. I would have expected that Germany of all countries would recognize these tactics for exactly what they are: almost a direct replay of Hitler's pre-WWII tactics. It should be all the more galling because the proximal cause was that Ukraine was too "pro-EU". Yet the EU doesn't lift a finger. AFAICT, Obama doesn't do much because he is more concerned about ISIS, and sees Ukraine as a European problem.
This is what judges are always complaining about. Congress/parliament wants to look good and votes stuff in with utter disregard to the legal implications and how it interacts with other laws.
There is still a big fight in EU law about equality between men and women interaction with divorce proceedings (you can imagine how long this has been going on). Before the equality vote is was okay to treat women differently when it comes to infidelity. Why ? Because in practice, offspring resulting from infidelity has rights (ie. inheritance + money) from both partners in a marriage. If a man has extramarital offspring, he can choose to not be known and he can choose not to be the legal parent. But men and women are equal, it's in the law.
So ... what do we do ?
a) can women deny legal parentage for kids (this would be a disaster for those kids) after giving birth ? The answer is no. Men, of course, can do this for obvious reasons.
b) will we force natural parentage to be registered ? (problem here is, of course, that in many cases it's simply not known. And if the woman doesn't know, gets it wrong (unintentionally or otherwise) or isn't talking, what are you going to do ?)
c) do you revise legal parentage during divorce proceedings (again, in many cases a disaster for the kids)
For obvious reasons, parliaments are not touching this with a 10-foot pole.
> In this case, EU data-privacy laws emerged as a way to harmonize EU trade and law enforcement practices. They were then made compatible with US laws through various international agreements and treaties. Things were working, more or less.
I wonder why this even needs to be stated, but of course EU privacy laws do not protect against search and seizure as part of a criminal investigation.
Which they wouldn't do, because what they would ask would be against the law.
Congress, and to a lesser extent POTUS, are the parties that have voted in these laws and are controlling the agencies doing this, and have the power to change them. Judges should NOT attempt to do so. That is the very definition of what a judge does.
Both parties have mastered using presidential appointments to the supreme court to "change" the law. This is very bad, as they're not supposed to be in control of that. The judiciary's "check and balances" check is mostly to prevent congress from going against the constitution (ridiculous example: voting slavery back in with 51% of votes). That is their function.
1) Many companies have pulled their data from US-based data centers for fear of government intrusion after the Snowden revelations.
2) The future of Microsoft's server business is in the cloud and they have (likely) told customers their data is safe if stored in the EU
Thus it stands to reason that in order to keep customers and make money, they are motivated to win this case.
Also it would be interesting to see if someone would be criminally liable in Ireland.
That's the most principally interesting thing here IMHO... Can the government of one country compel a citizen to commit a crime in another country? At least in Sweden it could easily be considered a form of espionage to hand over emails to a foreign government.
A few years ago I would have ended that question with !?!?!?, now I'm not so sure... :(
What I'm saying is that there are companies that care about your data for it is their strategy, and then there are companies like Microsoft that will happily steer the ship given whatever wind is blowing at them on any given day.
It would destroy an entire business of theirs. It's vital to their very survival to stop it. It's not even a question, this is as large of an attack on their business as there could be.
Why can't it be all three?
Sticking to principles can be quite profitable, but it still needs balls.
You can't have people unlearn what they have learned. If your wife cheats on you, even if she manifestly passes on an opportunity to do it again in a well publicized display, you are going to have a hard time trusting her from then on and if fidelity is important to you, you may start to examine your options...
Microsoft isn't going anywhere soon. They are embedded. But they are not going to be generally trusted again by many, and I don't believe this can be fixed by a couple of high profile PR schemes. This isn't MS hatred nor NSA rejection. Just stating the reality of the situation. Alternatives are going to be looked for and this case won't change that.