Microsoft just won a huge legal victory on email privacy
U.S. warrants can’t force tech companies to turn over data stored overseas, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
The government often doesn’t need a warrant to get your e-mails. But most think it should:
Your e-mails have fewer legal protections than you probably think. Thanks to a 1980s-era law known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, the government generally doesn’t need a warrant to get its hands on e-mails stored in your inbox for more than six months.
The law dates back to long before storing everything in “the cloud” became the norm: When it was passed, it seemed crazy that digital storage could become so cheap that companies like Google would offer archive all of your e-mails (and much of the rest of our life) online. But even though how people use e-mail has changed dramatically since then, the law has not, despite bipartisan pushes to update it in recent years.
Now new polling suggests Americans are ready for the law to change. Some 77 percent of more than 1,000 registered voters surveyed by pollsters at Vox Populi this month said they believe a warrant should be required to access “emails, photos and other private communications stored online.”
Source: Washington Post
Microsoft case: DoJ says it can demand every email from any US-based provider:
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.
Startup Crystal claims it can help you write better e-mails by mining recipients’ online data for clues to their personality.
(Read the full story / Illustration by Patrick Kyle)