Microsoft Defies Court Order, Will Not Give Emails to US Government

The casualness with which the U.S. Government asks a private company to violate EU and Irish law is truly disturbing.<p>The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power.<p>And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don&#x27;t even care if you did if for the PR, it&#x27;s still a brave stand.

<i>&gt; Judge Preska of course feels differently, and she has consistently agreed with the prosecution argument that the physical location of email is irrelevant because Microsoft controls the data from its base in the United States.</i><p>I find this bit very interesting. As opposed to Microsoft being a US company, it is that it&#x27;s operations are located in the US. I wonder what effects this decision could have on the US labor market if companies relocate operations in the same way they relocate certain things for tax avoidance.

&gt; Despite a federal court order directing Microsoft to turn overseas-held email data to federal authorities, the software giant said Friday it will continue to withhold that information as it waits for the case to wind through the appeals process. The judge has now ordered both Microsoft and federal prosecutors to advise her how to proceed by next Friday, September 5.<p>&gt; Let there be no doubt that Microsoft&#x27;s actions in this controversial case are customer-centric. The firm isn&#x27;t just standing up to the US government on moral principles. It&#x27;s now defying a federal court order.<p>Whoever wrote this clearly didn&#x27;t bother wondering if, just maybe, handing out customer data &quot;overseas&quot; (&quot;overseas&quot; apparently means Ireland) would be illegal under EU and Irish law. But let&#x27;s not minor details like this get in the way of good PR.

if the ruling is upheld, web services that face legal discovery like google, dropbox, facebook, microsoft, etc will face an amazing burden of data retention cost.<p>there is an amazing tax already on these services having to implement per government specific retention policies based on where they do business. for example in ireland, by law you need to be able to produce up to a year of content even if an account has been deleted. in the u.s. the period is much shorter. so if other countries create similar legislation after seeing a u.s. version of this law stick, everyone will have to implement a myriad of retention policies, or worst case retention, in every datacenter they operate. it drives up cost and complexity in the services.<p>this might not be popular to say, but microsoft taking a stand here is an amazingly good thing for our industry.

I cancelled my Dropbox subscription several years ago for precisely this sort of situation. Not that any of my files are particularly wonderful, but the point being that I would no longer have control over other people having any and all access to them.<p>Microsoft will eventually roll over.

Not that I don&#x27;t respect the decision, but something tells me that we would be less happy, in other instances, to see giant companies like MS decide when the law should apply to them.

Here&#x27;s the 64k dollar question. <i></i>If<i></i> Snowden hadn&#x27;t dropped the dime on the douchebaggery going on not just at NSA, but also w.r.t. the complicity&#x2F;cooperation by all the biggies(Google, FB, MS, etc), would MS be doing this?<p>I assert that the answer is clearly a big No....anyone else agree with me??

Impressive move by Microsoft, frankly i&#x27;m more enclined to use MS cloud services,if they challenge US court orders on a regular basis. do some people know what they risk?

Maybe I&#x27;ve missed it, but is data requested belonging to a US or non-US resident?

So, I wonder if Microsoft wins this appeal, how practical would it be to stripe encrypted data across data centers in 2+ countries. The idea being that to obtain the data stored, would require legal authorization in each country?

It&#x27;s a very confusing article, I must say. On the one hand it seems to imply Microsoft is defying the law on behalf of its customers. If that is the case MS is in contempt of court and presumably the board of directors and other executives could face criminal sanctions. However there&#x27;s certainly no mention of that and in other parts of the article it sounds like this is just one more round in an ongoing legal case ...<p>&gt; The removal of the suspension legally requires Microsoft to hand over the email immediately<p>vs<p>&gt; The judge has now ordered both Microsoft and federal prosecutors to advise her how to proceed by next Friday, September 5<p>Paul Thurrott is of course a relentlessly pro-Microsoft writer, and I can&#x27;t help but get the feeling he&#x27;s trying to take advantage of strategic ambiguity to put out a positive story here. I will stay tuned to see if indeed there is some kind of punishment meted out to Miscrosoft - otherwise my assumption would be that this is much less of a story than it sounds.

I can&#x27;t believe I am actually saying this -- &quot;Go Microsoft!&quot;. For once, they are on the right side.

This case may be the leading edge of a huge wave with a global sweep.<p>The sticky point may be that the locality of data is impermanent and ambiguous. In the MS case, though the data is said to be stored on a server in Ireland, it could just as well be distributed, moved or duplicated anywhere, and for all we know it already has been.<p>Eventually laws will have to come to terms with the implications of the Internet: data, like a flock of migratory birds, for its own reasons goes one place to another and knows nothing about national boundaries.

maybe I am some kind of sheep but this kind of stand makes me strongly consider again Microsoft as a platform of choice against Apple.<p>Bravo Microsoft.

This is interesting but let&#x27;s give the cheer leading a break. What were really talking about here is corporations testing the size of their stick versus the government&#x27;s. The feds are pursuing a USA case against and american entity and the data in question is held by another american entity, which happens to have moved it to Ireland. Well why did they do that and when? Was is always there and will it always be there? In what country is the data chiefly accessed? If it is sent and received by Americans exclusively then perhaps the place where it is nominally stored might not even matter. In that case the place of storage would be just the kind of corporate fiction that courts are happy to pierce.<p>What if the data is striped among all the countries where Microsoft has datacenters? Do you get the union of all possible data protections? Or the intersection?<p>There are actual legal questions here and Microsoft&#x27;s position is not neutrally good.

Am I the only one who&#x27;s worried this may make the government <i>less</i> careful about giving orders in the future? (i.e. won&#x27;t they figure &quot;hey, let&#x27;s just give the order; if they disagree then they&#x27;ll defy it&quot;?)

This raises the question: if the judge&#x27;s option ends up being held, would any non-US based company buy services from a US company?

Good job for Microsoft being the first to stand up against a surveillance government. If only everyone else was brave enough to follow, we would see change.

+1 to MS!

Thank you, Edward Snowden.

This is because the USG already has backdoors, right?

So I guess the US government is not logging everything yet... so this is 2 good news.

Watch my left hand waving while my right fist delivers a body blow.

They give it to the NSA, and the NSA shares it with other govt. bodies through that search engine (and probably a dozen other ways).<p>Anyway, it always freaks me out a bit when people cheer a megacorp like MS. They&#x27;re not fighting for you, they&#x27;re fighting for your perception of them. The faster you cheer, the less they&#x27;ll do.

I have a feeling that USG already have the data they need and are just running &quot;parallel discovery&#x2F;whitewashing&quot; here.<p>Still it is nice to see MS take a stand.