We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email

You might want to reconsider posting comments like that. You may think you're making a principled stand against the evils of paywalls (aside: how do you expect online publications to stay in business?) but in fact all you're doing is advertising the fact that you're either too lazy or too stupid to take the trivial steps required to get around one.

josefresco2• 12 years ago

"too lazy or too stupid to take the trivial steps required to get around one"

Or maybe he just doesn't want to? You know, on principle? Even skirting the paywall, you're boosting the WSJ's viewership stats which in turn, helps them sell more advertising/contributes to their "value".

nfoz2• 12 years ago

I appreciated the comment because I do not want to bother navigating to a paywall'd page. And I'd be happy if these publications didn't stay in business.

panarky• 12 years ago

Relevant excerpts:

Microsoft believes you own emails stored in the cloud, and that they have the same privacy protection as paper letters sent by mail...

The U.S. government can obtain emails only subject to the full legal protections of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment...

A search warrant cannot reach beyond U.S. shores...

[The US government] argues that your emails become the business records of a cloud provider. Because business records have a lower level of legal protection, the government claims that it can use its broader authority to reach emails stored anywhere in the world.

lisper7• 12 years ago

your emails become the business records of a cloud provider

That is simply ridiculous. Email stored by a cloud provider isn't a business record of the provider any more than the contents of a physical letter stored in a rented mail box is a business record of the box provider.

616c• 12 years ago

And soon they will argue that your mail is not your mail, and subject to legal protection, when it is in any USPS facility because it is government assets until it touches your mailbox.

Granted, they already track all metadata without opening it (if you believe that). This is attrocious. I come from a family of attorneys and I have told them I lost all respect for the system in which they operate, and Jeffersonian calls to refresh the tree of liberty have started to seem very real and urgent these days.

In short, fuck these animals. I hope they choke.

rayiner6• 12 years ago

A physical letter in a rented mailbox is also generally not data-mined for the commercial purposes of the service provider.

I think cloud companies essentially want the 4th amendment benefits of treating the cloud like real world private areas (e.g. bank lock boxes), without any of the obligations that come along with that.

The "reasonable expectation of privacy" in things like safe deposit boxes or storage units is based on the actual fact that service providers generally do not and cannot access the contents of those rented spaces. To apply that same reasoning to data stored in the cloud, we have to indulge in the fiction that various bots and sysops cannot in fact access that data, and do not routinely do so.

That said, I think the cloud folks are ultimately going to win, on the basis of Riley v. California (which is noted in Brad Smith's op-ed). I think Riley is technologically ignorant in glossing over technical distinctions between local and cloud storage that are relevant to privacy, but it all but says the cloud is protected under the 4th amendment. I don't know what's left to fight over.

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

Microsoft believes you own emails stored in the cloud, and that they have the same privacy protection as paper letters sent by mail

But do they, really?

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26677607

rhino3692• 12 years ago

A search warrant cannot reach beyond U.S. shores...

Well, that is also part of this case. The court is going to determine how to fit data into the current caselaw. There is good reason for why the US can't order searches in another country.

But if Microsoft has servers in the United States that can routinely access their cloud servers, there is a good argument that data is really in the United States as well.

The business records argument is a bad one. However, I don't see any good reason for why the government shouldn't be able to access American companies cloud data with valid warrant.

rayiner6• 12 years ago

The government's case here isn't a ridiculous one. I can't think of any other situation where there is 4th amendment protection of property in custody of a third party where the custodian has essentially unregulated and unrestricted access to the property and no consequences for loss or damage to the property. Its a really novel argument on the part of Microsoft to claim that your emails on their service are still your property, when none of the usual protections that apply to property held by third parties applies to that email.

wahsd• 12 years ago

If people only realized how our government is the vampire squid that is hell-bent on world domination.

Embrace your future state of slavery, it is invariable.

krapp• 12 years ago

I don't think there's any shortage of people who believe the US government is a bloodsucking, many-tentacled world-destroying monster. But hyperbole of this degree is neither insightful, nor is it helpful.

count• 12 years ago

So, with the US Govt. move to use commercial cloud providers (including Microsoft Office365!), does that then make all of the USG communications stored on that system 'business records' of the provider? That would completely destroy the whole cloud market for anything other than public data...

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

If Microsoft was serious about this, they'd also offer end-to-end encryption for their e-mails (open source protocol, otherwise they shouldn't bother).

But because they aren't doing this, it just shows they are more concerned about not losing business overseas than "fighting for your e-mail".

fooqux4• 12 years ago

I'm no longer sure that is enough. Considering what happened to Lavabit, just offering end-to-end encryption is only going to work until the government decides they want what you have hidden. I doubt that Microsoft will put up as much of a fight, or take the high road out, like the Lavabit founder did.

Fighting them on the legal front to stop such practices from starting may well be the best option right now. Even though Microsoft may be doing this for business reasons, it'll still help everyone.

morsch• 12 years ago

Lavabit wasn't end-to-end encrypted.

Kalium5• 12 years ago

If memory serves, the feds had probable cause and a warrant when they want after Lavabit. Lavabit tried to fight it. Lavabit lost. So they shut down instead and tried to spin it as the feds shutting them down.

me10104• 12 years ago

End users need to and can take control over their own email privacy. GPG. Ten minutes to download, install, and generate a key pair is all you need to secure your email. Perhaps the willingness to do so will increase when the government successfully argues that non-encrypted mail posted through an email server is the same as posting your thoughts on a public peg board...

If you want full compatibility, you can pay a small yearly [extortion] fee to the Verisign gatekeepers... but I prefer not to...

marcosdumay2• 12 years ago

End-to-end means that Microsoft has no capability of reading the emails, or share them with anybody, as they are not in any end of the communication.

diafygi• 12 years ago

So where is the line on the governments position?

If you use AWS, is all the data (S3, EC2 filesystems, RDS data+backups, etc.) now a business record of Amazon?

What about renting dedicated servers at your local datacenter? You're basically renting bare hardware at that point, but the hard drives are still technically owned by the datacenter. Is the data on those hard drives business records of the datacenter?

Not being able separate the owner of the hardware and the owner of the data on the hardware seems like it would have a ton of modern consequences.

EDIT: Here's a fun thought experiment. Say I bought a license to analyze some music dataset from a record label. That license requires that can't share the music data with anyone. When I upload the dataset to S3 to run my Elastic Map Reduce script on it, did I just violate my license because that data is now a business record of Amazon?

pessimizer• 12 years ago

Here's a link that will work: http://news.google.com/news/url?sr=1&ct2=us%2F1_0_s_0_1_a&sa...

CamperBob2• 12 years ago

No good here, article is still paywalled. Why does Google even bother indexing the WSJ?

AJ007• 12 years ago

It is a lose-lose case for the US. If they win the case, other countries say sorry you can't do business here. We already have seen countries such as Brazil and Russia make moves to requiring companies to securely store user's data in country.

This makes a good argument for open source software development and decoupling storage. Software-as-a-service may end up being Commodity-as-a-service. Terrible for enterprises like Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM who want to be global "cloud" providers.

mkal_tsr• 12 years ago

The government seeks to sidestep these rules, asserting that emails you store in the cloud cease to belong exclusively to you. In court filings, it argues that your emails become the business records of a cloud provider.

So, how long until Dropbox contents are just a matter of business records?

tartuffe78• 12 years ago

I would guess back when Dropbox passed 10,000 users

junto• 12 years ago

I think Microsoft are right here and I'm glad that they are willing to take this on. Of is in their interests to show that their customers' email privacy is afforded the same level of protection that normal mail does.

al2o3cr• 12 years ago

"Microsoft believes you own emails stored in the cloud, and that they have the same privacy protection as paper letters sent by mail"

Clarification: Microsoft now believes this (or claims to). They had no problem handing PRISM the keys to the kingdom while it was still secret.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

spectre256• 12 years ago

While it's understandable to feel down about the fact that Microsoft used to feel it was ok to hand over emails, there's a more positive way to look at it: this article is strong evidence that the public opinion regarding online privacy has changed such that, were Microsoft to give up these emails, it's own business would suffer negatively.

It's not a signal of the end of our battle for privacy, but it's something.

ak217• 12 years ago

This is the same Microsoft that ran ads against Google based on the claim that unlike Google's ad algorithms, they don't look at your email, then turned around and looked at a user's email when they found out that a Microsoft employee sent confidential information to that account. (http://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsoft-issues-mea-cul...).

It's also the same Microsoft that was found to have provided the greatest aid to the NSA in accommodating their mass wiretap requests (compared to Yahoo, Google, and other webmail providers).

The irony is delicious.

To put it very mildly, I question Microsoft's integrity and wouldn't trust them with my data. Want to showcase a hero who actually went to great lengths to fight the feds over your email? Try Ladar Levison.

We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email

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