http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2025244133_microsoftamicusxml.html
By Matt Day
Seattle Times technology reporter
Microsoft can count on a much larger cast of supporters in its legal fight over a warrant seeking a customer’s emails.
Amazon.com, Apple and the American Civil Liberties Union were among the dozens of organizations and individuals that affixed their names Monday to arguments supporting Microsoft’s challenge of a government request for the user’s data.
A federal judge last December signed a warrant seeking the data as part of a drug-trafficking investigation.
The company sued to block the warrant, arguing that the order exceeded prosecutors’ power because the account’s emails were stored overseas — in Microsoft servers in Ireland.
Through two lower-court rounds — both of which Microsoft lost — the case has become a flashpoint in the debate on the government’s digital powers following Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the extent of federal surveillance.
Microsoft, along with other U.S. technology giants focused on cloud computing, stands to lose business if customers can’t trust the privacy protections promised by the company’s servers.
On Monday’s deadline for interested parties to weigh in on the appeal of the warrant case, Microsoft hosted a panel discussion of trade-group representatives and civil-liberties advocates, moderated by former ABC news anchor Charlie Gibson at the company’s New York offices.
The panelists said the case goes beyond the arcane plumbing of the Internet and hits at issues at the core of privacy in the digital age.
A deluge of court filings reinforced that point.
“It really sends a message, not just for the judiciary, but for the White House and Congress as well,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said of the level of support the company’s position received Monday. “This broad support shows that people recognize that this is a fundamental policy issue with implications for the future of the Internet,” Smith said.
Verizon, joined by Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, eBay and others, argued in a filing Monday that a government victory in Microsoft’s case would harm the business prospects for American companies abroad and spur retaliation from foreign governments.
Apple said lower courts had failed to delve deep enough into the international political implications of giving the government added power to seek data abroad.
A slate of U.S. and global media organizations, including The Seattle Times, argued that a government victory in the case could endanger the ability of journalists to do their jobs.
Separate filings were signed by a collection of 35 computer and data-science experts, including Edward Lazowska and Henry Levy of the University of Washington, and business lobbyists such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the warrant case against Microsoft, declined to comment.
Government lawyers have said that existing data-privacy laws give law-enforcement agencies the power to seek such data, and that a Microsoft victory could make it easier for criminals to evade prosecution by storing data abroad.
The government has until March to file its response to Microsoft’s case, which is winding through a months-long briefing schedule in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York.
Legal experts say the case could ultimately land at the Supreme Court, or reach a resolution elsewhere in Washington, D.C.
Lawyers have raised the prospect that the Justice Department or White House could intervene and retool their policies on warrants seeking digital data.
Meanwhile, legislation introduced in the Senate earlier this year would update the laws governing electronic privacy to specify which data prosecutors could seek abroad.
Smith said in an interview that the warrant case was among the topics that came up during Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s meetings with officials in the nation’s capital last week.
At Monday’s event, Smith and other panelists sought to link Microsoft’s position to the debate about government access to personal effects that’s lasted on from the founding of the postal service through the invention of the telegraph and telephone.
If the U.S. government can’t open a person’s sealed envelope in Dublin without proper authorization, the thinking goes, it can’t do the same with someone’s email.
“The technology is new,” Smith said. “But the principles are longer-lasting.”
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