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Re: US has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the World
Microsoft case: DoJ says it can demand every email from any US-based provider
Microsoft counsel addresses question of US search warrant for Hotmail emails stored in Ireland: ‘We would go crazy if China did this to us’
The United States government has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the world from any email provider headquartered within US borders, Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers told a federal appeals court on Wednesday.
The case being heard in the second circuit court of appeals is between the US and Microsoft and concerns a search warrant that the government argues should compel Microsoft to retrieve emails held on a Hotmail server in Ireland.
Microsoft contends that the DoJ has exceeded its authority with potentially dangerous consequences. Organizations including Apple, the government of Ireland, Fox News, NPR and the Guardian have filed amicus briefs with the court, arguing the case could set a precedent for governments around the world to seize information held in the cloud. Judges have ruled against the tech company twice.
Counsel for Microsoft contends that the US search warrant should not have been used to compel it to hand over emails stored in Ireland. “This is an execution of law enforcement seizure on their land,” Joshua Rosenkranz, counsel for Microsoft, told the court. “We would go crazy if China did this to us.”
The DoJ contends that emails should be treated as the business records of the company hosting them, by which definition only a search warrant would be needed in order to compel the provision of access to them no matter where they are stored. Microsoft argues the emails are the customers’ personal documents and a US warrant does not carry the authority needed to compel the company to hand it over.
“This notion of the government’s that private emails are Microsoft’s business records is very scary,” Rosenkranz told the court.
The three-judge panel hearing the appeal consists of judges Victor Bolden, Susan Carney and Gerard Lynch, the last of whom successfully prosecuted commodities oil magnate Marc Rich in the late 1980s. Rich counted among his clients embargoed Iran, apartheid-era South Africa and Chile under Pinochet.
Lynch’s case against Rich hinged on subpoenaed documents from Swiss companies, a fact both he and assistant US attorney Justin Anderson were quick to point out. When Rosenkranz said the warrant constituted a violation of national sovereignty, Lynch said: “That’s exactly what the Swiss said we were doing in Marc Rich. I stood there and argued it to this court.
“We don’t do foreign relations,” Lynch said. “If Congress passes a law and the executive wields it like a blunderbuss in such a way as to cause international tensions, that’s for them to worry about.”
But Lynch also expressed reservations about the government’s contention that this was a particularly powerful search warrant. “I have a lot of experience with search warrants,” said Lynch. “I’ve signed a few of them, and they don’t require you to disclose things.”
Warrants give law enforcement the right to enter and search premises; subpoenas compel their targets to disclose information. “It’s a subpoena dressed up as a warrant that also has the powers of a subpoena?” Bolden asked Anderson, who told him it was indeed.
Anderson said that a warrant required a very high legal standard, and said that the case wasn’t about who ultimately had the intellectual property rights to the emails. “It’s not about ownership, it’s about custody and control,” he told the judges.
He further said that the US couldn’t reasonably be expected to know the nationality of someone committing a crime. “It is highly unlikely at the time the government is issuing a warrant in a narcotics case that it knows the nationality of the persons involved,” he said.
Judge Carney grilled the government counsel on his interpretation of the statute in play, the Stored Communications Act of 1986, which Microsoft contends could not possibly have foreseen international cloud computing.
“The warrant doesn’t care where these records are,” Anderson told Carney.
She asked: “And what indication is there in the statute that Congress didn’t care, either?”
Lynch seemed fascinated that there were so few American regulations on what Microsoft could choose to do with its clients’ emails. He asked whether the company could take everyone’s emails “to some briefcase-bank country that has no regulations and disclose them to the National Enquirer” and Rosenkranz acknowledged that legally it could. (“Our business model would evaporate,” he said in answer to a similar question earlier in the hearing.)
“Both sides are in agreement that there are not as many protections on electronic communications as electronic communicators might like because the providers can do whatever they want with those communications, so long as they do it abroad,” Lynch concluded.
At the end of the hearing, Lynch echoed Rosenkranz’s call for legislation from Congress to clarify the decades-old law – Microsoft has called for Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad (Leads) Act, though he observed to Rosenkranz that the legislature isn’t known for its speed. “It would be helpful if Congress would engage in that kind of nuanced interpretation,” he said, “and we should all be holding our breaths for when they do.”
A ruling in the case could come as early as October or as late as February.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 … ch-warrant
Re: US has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the World
Why would they want to read my wife's facebook updates, my trash talking with my friends or all my junk mail from various retailers that i haven't gotten around to unsubscribing from? Seems like a bad use of manpower to me but who am I? 
Re: US has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the World
Why would they want to read my wife's facebook updates, my trash talking with my friends or all my junk mail from various retailers that i haven't gotten around to unsubscribing from?
Don't think they're interested in your Facebook updates Neemo They'll probably be doing automated deep scans through every email to look for words like ISIS, bomb, terrorist, meth, crack, marijuana, etc. If your email is free of any illegal activity I'm sure you'll be fine 
I'm not in favour of this at all. I'd love to have a little rant about the ridiculous level of privacy invasion going on here but I'm worried that this post has probably already set alarm bells ringing in some government HQ due to certain keywords in my previous sentence.
Does anyone even use Hotmail these days? They'll be going after illegal uploaders on Myspace next 
Re: US has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the World
Hey!!!!!
I've had the same hotmail account since 1997...my address doesn't event have numbers in it lol.
Have you tried Gmail? I find there spam filters to be much more accurate, and they've introduced tabs in the last year which organises your email 
Important stuff goes in the inbox (default), then you have tabs for Forums (Evo etc), Promotions (Amazon, Ebay etc), Social Media (Twitter/FB/etc). So you basically have an inbox with important shit that needs dealing with, then you have tons of spam boxes which never get read
Re: US has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the World
They'll probably be doing automated deep scans through every email to look for words like ISIS, bomb, terrorist, meth, crack, marijuana, etc. If your email is free of any illegal activity I'm sure you'll be fine
The other day me and a buddy were exchanging The Wire quotes on facebook. Mostly drug and homicide related of course. Stuff like "I got some heroin for sale", "you gotta hit somebody for me". Computers at Homeland must have been going mad. 
Re: US has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the World
Here's some comments in the article
Here's an analogous situation.
FedEx is a US headquartered company. A person sends a letter using FedEx from Stockholm to Madrid.
Will the DoJ claim that it can demand a copy of the letter because FedEx is headquartered in the US?
Sorry, DoJ, you're full of it. Follow due process and the international treaties that the United States signed with reliable, democratic, rule-of-law countries and quit your hissy fit. You're embarrassing yourself, are disrespectful of the Constitution, and are proving yourself to have no idea what the rule of law really is.
A Guardian staff member commented on the post.
So, this is interesting because it actually came up in the hearing (yes, with specific reference to FedEx): the DoJ says that emails are company records, so while they COULD search FedEx with a warrant and get the label information (since it's property of Federal Express), they CAN'T demand FedEx open packages and rummage through the contents. DoJ says emails are just like label information. Microsoft says that's news to everybody who uses email.
Re: US has the right to demand the emails of anyone in the World
Hey!!!!!
I've had the same hotmail account since 1997...my address doesn't event have numbers in it lol.
Everyone I know has a hotmail account too 
.
Infact my ASUS computer requires me to login with my hotmail account.
