“Some of the world’s largest technology companies, including Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., voiced support for Microsoft Corp. in a data-privacy dispute between the software maker and the U.S. government,” Kelly Gilblom and Dina Bass report for Bloomberg News. “Companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Verizon Communications Inc. and EBay Inc., as well as business and advocacy groups and computer science professors, plan to file 10 amicus briefs with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals to bolster Microsoft’s position in a legal fight against the government, the Redmond, Washington-based company said today.”
“The case, which Microsoft has lost twice and is appealing, pits the company against U.S. lawmakers seeking access to e-mails housed in a Microsoft data center in Ireland. The U.S. government has said the e-mails will help it solve a criminal case, while Microsoft officials have said providing access would violate privacy,” Gilblom and Bass report. “The issue has come front and center for U.S. technology companies in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations last year about U.S. government spying, which have left some foreign customers concerned about the privacy of their data stored with U.S. providers.”
MacDailyNews Take: As well they should be. Obviously.
“It’s like if ‘someone rooms in a Hilton hotel in England – – just because Hilton is a U.S. company, U.S. authorities can’t just say, ‘Hey, open that room,” said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer science professor who signed on to the friend-of-the-court briefs. ‘Presumably the laws of England would apply,'” Gilblom and Bass report.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.
When all these type of security matters come to a close and if the companies must hand over the info they should black out all and any info. That’s what the government would do
B R A V O !
I can’t remember being proud of Microsoft, until now. It’s great to see other companies on board to stop turning the world into a massive, criminal, surveillance state. We The People rule, like it or not.
True. Actually, data stored by Dutch providers on Dutch soil has become a unique selling point for those providers, silently referring to the data mining that is going on in the US. Now some will have doubts about the Dutch government too, and perhaps rightly so, but it shows how the way the US conducts business has not gone unnoticed.
It occurs to me that “the Government” may know what’s in those emails from their surveillance of the I’net, but recognizes that the evidence will not stand up in court, because it was illegally collected. Hoist on their own petard!
reformgovernmentsurveillance.com has one too many words in it. Take out ‘surveillance’ and you’ll have it!
It takes our corrupt US government to bring Apple & Microsoft together.
If passed it would/should mean that all non-USA companies would be able provide the data from their USA subsidiaries to their local governments. Is that a world we want?