Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Government after receiving over 2,500 requests to secretly access customer data in just 18 months. To make matters worse, the government demanded that Microsoft never tell customers their data was accessed by the government in a majority of cases.
The urgency for action is clear and growing. Over the past 18 months, the U.S. government has required that we maintain secrecy regarding 2,576 legal demands, effectively silencing Microsoft from speaking to customers about warrants or other legal process seeking their data. Notably and even surprisingly, 1,752 of these secrecy orders, or 68 percent of the total, contained no fixed end date at all. This means that we effectively are prohibited forever from telling our customers that the government has obtained their data.
Microsoft has attempted to fight many of these requests and the government's demand that it not inform customers. The government, in a recent situation, has tried to have the company held in contempt for resisting its request.
In the past, business servers were usually housed in a building own by the company and the government would need to give notice in order to enter the building. Now that companies are using cloud hosting, the government is using secrecy orders to get the data without the company or persons' knowledge.
This lawsuit comes just a day after it was revealed that Canadian Police have obtained BlackBerry's Global Decryption Key and have been using it for years to secretly access Pin to Pin BBMs.
Hit the link below for more details...
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The urgency for action is clear and growing. Over the past 18 months, the U.S. government has required that we maintain secrecy regarding 2,576 legal demands, effectively silencing Microsoft from speaking to customers about warrants or other legal process seeking their data. Notably and even surprisingly, 1,752 of these secrecy orders, or 68 percent of the total, contained no fixed end date at all. This means that we effectively are prohibited forever from telling our customers that the government has obtained their data.
Microsoft has attempted to fight many of these requests and the government's demand that it not inform customers. The government, in a recent situation, has tried to have the company held in contempt for resisting its request.
In the past, business servers were usually housed in a building own by the company and the government would need to give notice in order to enter the building. Now that companies are using cloud hosting, the government is using secrecy orders to get the data without the company or persons' knowledge.
This lawsuit comes just a day after it was revealed that Canadian Police have obtained BlackBerry's Global Decryption Key and have been using it for years to secretly access Pin to Pin BBMs.
Hit the link below for more details...
Read More