Privacy win for MS and all.

[caseyjones955]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-usa-warrant-idUSKBN1581YQ

I was afraid this was going to get overturned.

:clapping: :clapping:

 

[Kronx]

Well it's a victory for now. I'm sure it will go to the Supreme Court. Fingers crossed.

 

[[email protected]]

So its a "win" when the government can't access emails in a federal narcotics case because the emails are hosted on a server in another country?

I don't think the government has a right to see what anyone is doing on a daily basis but if you are involved in a major crime I feel that the government DOES have the right to fully investigate which, in this case, could involve emails on a server in Ireland

I'm not tech savvy by any means but what comes to my mind is something like the Hillary email scandal. What were to happen if she was storing "classified" emails on her own private server in another country? Would that mean they could not be investigated to see if they really were classified? If that were the case, would you still consider this a win?

 

[Kronx]

Here's how you stop a case like Hillary's. You don't let federal employees do their job through private email accounts. It was allowed and never should have been allowed. Problem solved.

I can give one small piece of why this is a complicated issue. Lets talk about the service Hotmail. Anyone can have a hotmail account. I can have one, you can have one, a truck driver in the UK can have one, a fisherman in the Netherlands can have one. If I have a hotmail account, my hotmail mailbox resides in a database. That database can have thousands of other mailboxes on it. One server can have dozens of databases on it. The database is replicated to other servers for redundancy. So my email is copied to multiple databases. And these databases will span across multiple datacenters. So if there is a database crash, a server crash, or hell even iff a big data line gets cut at one of the data centers, my mailbox will go online at one of the others and in most cases I can't even tell any of that happened. My email isn't disrupted at all. It's all of this redundancy that's built in so that people have access to their email almost 100% of the time.

But my mailbox might be on the same database as your mailbox. Or might be on the same database as someone in Canada's or Latin Americas mailbox.

So now lest say the US Govertment wants all of my email. It comes down to how they're going to request it. If they say "Just give us everything in his mailbox." Then MS would probably do it. But if they say "Give us all the data on the server his mailbox resides on." Then that IS a problem.

Now to put it in a more practical explanation. Lets imagine my mailbox is an apartment in a large apartment building. If the US government says "Kronx is under investigation, want full access to search and monitor this one apartment." Then most apartment managers will comply. But if the US government says "Kronx is under investigation, we want full access to search and monitor this entire apartment building." Then that's a much more broader request that now implicates everyone else who lives there.

 

[[email protected]]

So now lest say the US Govertment wants all of my email. It comes down to how they're going to request it. If they say "Just give us everything in his mailbox." Then MS would probably do it. But if they say "Give us all the data on the server his mailbox resides on." Then that IS a problem.

I don't see a problem with sharing all emails in his account. I wasn't aware of them requesting all info on the server. I don't understand why it would even be needed.

 

[caseyjones955]

Emails should only be accessible under order of a federal judge on an individual basis, and then only with damn compelling evidence. None of this mass email data mining or breaching emails looking for criminals. A green light into privacy is far to easy for government to abuse.

Many email servers like Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, Gmail (I know many run together) have backdoors built right in. They dont need an order or anything, you agree to it when you sign up. Mass email gathering and snooping are common for everything from directed advertising to gov intrusion and it's perfectly legal and business as usual. I still use a Yahoo address for mundane shit like CL but I have a private secure pay server for more meaningful stuff. I'm not a criminal and I will protect my privacy by any means available to me, on principle of for no other reason. Besides Hillary, what idiot uses email for the commission of a crime? I'm sure there are others, and thats what judges and warrants are for.

When a court tells gov "No, keep your greasy meat hooks out of that" then I'm thrilled. They hit a wall while trying to expand their reach. Win for privacy advocates, like myself. They should be able to access email in a serious crime investigation but if the servers are offshore then perhaps it's outside US jurisdiction, even if it is an American company.

 

[Kronx]

I don't see a problem with sharing all emails in his account. I wasn't aware of them requesting all info on the server. I don't understand why it would even be needed.

From what I understand in cases where the requests are just narrow to a suspects mailbox, Microsoft more often than not complies with the request. Its the bigger access they're pushing back on.