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

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

#61

Post by AndyNemmity »

tracker1 wrote: post #14
ryanburk wrote: post #4

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. 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 be…

That said, I don't think this has much to do with protecting MS's customers, or for that matter standing up for them as it is presented. I'm pretty sure it's more about MS operations being able to continue to run in Ireland and the rest of the EU. If MS hands this data over, you can be assured that MS would face stiff penalties and restrictions to even be able to operate in the EU, and would likely have their Azure f…

My work is very much involving this, and it does have to do with protecting customers, because those customers won't exist unless Microsoft stands up to this. It's very much an issue with all companies that are non-US.

That's why my company is putting datacenters everywhere. Chinese demand a Chinese data center for Cloud computing. This happens all over the world, and our strategy is all about that.

This is a very real issue, and if the US states that any US company has to turn over data, you can kiss every customer from another country goodbye.

It's an extremely serious situation in my view.

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

#62

Post by AndyNemmity »

jkestner wrote: post #53
ryanburk wrote: post #4

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. 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 be…

If data retention becomes a liability, will companies be forced to consider encrypting data or taking measures to ensure they don't ever see it, and thereby upend their business models? Or will governments require them to have a backdoor to the data?

The initial impact is companies from other countries will refuse to work with any company outside of their perceived comfort zone.

Take a company from Qatar. Perhaps they are comfortable with any datacenter in the middle east for Cloud Computing with a US company. If this becomes standard US law, they won't accept a US company for any reason. Thus every US company loses the customer, the profit, the business and it's replaced by others.

It's that simple. And what about companies that are from another country, but have US entities?

It's just a massive issue that could destroy corporate cloud computing.

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

#64

Post by AndyNemmity »

toyg wrote: post #60
burgers wrote: post #21

> 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 find this bit very interesting. As opposed to Microsoft being a US company, it is that it's operations are located in the US. I wonder what effects this decision could have on the US labor m…

> if companies relocate operations in the same way they relocate certain things for tax avoidance. They already do. Umpteen companies run servers in this or that country for specific legal reason which are not necessarily related to taxation. Classic case: companies with dubious stands in regard to copyright law. The PATRIOT Act already forced a number of companies to open European datacentres to satisfy particularly…

>The PATRIOT Act already forced a number of companies to open European datacentres to satisfy particularly-picky customers;

It's not picky customers, it's everyone. It's literally the first discussion that occurs. Any company in any part of the world wants their data in a datacenter near them, that follows rules they are comfortable with.

It cannot be overstated just how important this issue is to foreign companies.

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

#65

Post by jrapdx3 »

yutah wrote: post #59
jrapdx3 wrote: post #58

This case may be the leading edge of a huge wave with a global sweep. 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. Eventually laws will have to come to terms with the implications of the Internet: da…

one global country would probably fix that... or I guess you could end the Internet... but to tell you the truth, "cloud computing" needs to end instead.

I think it's going to be very hard for countries to work out how to deal with the issues. Pretty sure the Internet is going to continue to exist and provoke questions about what "national boundaries" mean in this context.

Predictions are dangerous, but probably the forecast for the future is that it will be even more "cloudy", whether we like it or not. Of course, can't do much about the weather anyway...

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

#66

Post by AndyNemmity »

mercurial wrote: post #2

> 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. > Let there be no doubt that Microsoft's actions…

It is illegal, but it also means you'd have no foreign customers. They would lose tons of contracts immediately. It would completely end the enterprise cloud revolution that is occurring.

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

#67

Post by AndyNemmity »

sashagim wrote: post #44
ignostic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The U.S. Gov has gone mad with power. Agreed. Hopefully this encourages more people to stand up to unreasonable violations of privacy from our government. > And for perhaps the first time ever: bravo Microsoft! I don't even care if you did if for the PR, it's still a brave stand. The question of whether a company is following principles or motivated by profit/PR is so strange to me. The question is nonsense and the…

Microsoft is not a person, but it is an organization, and like every organization has a corporate culture. For me, it's absolutely like having a character, exactly like a person has. It certainly starts with the founders, but grows with the company through years of hiring decisions, personal example, and internal communication. A company, as an organization, can be intelligent or stupid, creative or conservative; it…

I'm really shocked so many people see this as even a question.

I work for a company very similar to Microsoft. If this happened to us, we would do the same thing, for the very same reason.

We would lose every Cloud customer from another country immediately if this was followed. All our work investing and building data centers in the world would be wasted. Companies would pull away all contracts for Cloud work, and we would gain no new ones. It would be the end of the Enterprise Cloud.

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

#68

Post by AndyNemmity »

revelation wrote: post #39
sz4kerto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we can say that every company does everything only for money, and that's probably not far from the truth. However, exactly because this can be taken as an universal truth, it's generally advisable to not ponder on this while discussing what and how they do, because it does not add anything to the conversation. In this case, we can agree that it's the right thing (for us). Similarly, if you buy a good car, you d…

Huh? Of course it makes sense to ponder on the reasons behind a particular companies decision? That is what we call "the stock market". Theres such a thing as strategy. What I'm saying is that there are companies that care about your data for it is their strategy, and then there are companies like Microsoft that will happily steer the ship given whatever wind is blowing at them on any given day.

There isn't any pondering needed. They are doing it because if they follow this request it will destroy their enterprise cloud computing entirely. That's reason alone to do it.

It would destroy an entire business of theirs. It's vital to their very survival to stop it. It's not even a question, this is as large of an attack on their business as there could be.

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

#69

Post by toyg »

yutah wrote: post #59
jrapdx3 wrote: post #58

This case may be the leading edge of a huge wave with a global sweep. 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. Eventually laws will have to come to terms with the implications of the Internet: da…

one global country would probably fix that... or I guess you could end the Internet... but to tell you the truth, "cloud computing" needs to end instead.

> one global country would probably fix that

This is a joke only up to a point. The current legal landscape emerged throughout the last few centuries mostly in response to commercial pressures: as commerce grew in range, volume and needs, so did laws, agreements and conflicts.

We now have a situation where global commerce is real, both in a physical and logical sense. The law, both at national and international level, just doesn't know how to deal with it. Companies design hardware in Massachusetts, produce it in China, sell it in Europe, and file their accounts in Caribbean islands. They develop software in Romania, run it on servers in Texas, sell it to the Brazilian market, support it from India, and file accounts in Luxembourg. This stuff could only be done by a handful of players back in the '70s, and we could deal with it on ad-hoc basis ("dude, we know your money is in Switzerland, just open a token factory in my constituency and we'll call it even"). Now it's just how business works everywhere, and we need real processes to scale up.

What rules can be defined and applied? How are they going to be enforced? Who is responsible for amending them? These big questions are the real challenge of this century for us "First World", and some harmonization will eventually have to emerge one way or the other.

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