Time to Boost Privacy Protection Around Cloud Data: US Lawmakers

The witnesses spoke at a hearing on whether the US government overuses it secret subpoena power in a way that harms American Internet users.

Time to Boost Privacy Protection Around Cloud Data: US Lawmakers

Photo Credit: Reuters

Microsoft’s Tom Burt said the company receives many secrecy orders without much legal, factual analysis

Highlights
  • Lawmakers urged curbing of secretly sending subpeonas to cloud servers
  • Microsoft has received almost 3,500 secrecy orders a year
  • Microsoft said many such court orders should never have been approved
Advertisement

The United States needs to accord the same legal protections to user data held on tech companies' servers as it does to physical files stored in personal file cabinets, media attorneys and lawmakers said Wednesday.

The witnesses spoke at a hearing on whether the US government overuses it secret subpoena power in a way that harms American internet users. The proceeding follows revelations that former President Donald Trump's US Department of Justice secretly sought the phone records of reporters and Democratic representatives to investigate the leaks of classified material.

Word of the DOJ's investigations outraged lawmakers and prompted renewed talk of curbing the federal government's practice of secretly subpoenaing the cloud service providers — companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet's Google — to win access to their users' emails, documents and instant messages without giving them a chance to defend their interests.

US Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said the tactic was "an end run on the protections that the Fourth Amendment is supposed to provide to every American."

Hearst's chief legal officer, Eve Burton, spoke for many witnesses when she told the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee that "the same protections must apply whether the information is sought in an office file or on a cloud server across the country or across the world."

That call received a warm reception from lawmakers from both sides of the aisle.

Representative Tom McClintock, a California Republican, said this kind of surveillance in the United States was "in direct contravention of its most fundamental law."

The only representative of the tech industry at the hearing, Microsoft executive Tom Burt, said that in the last five years his company had received 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year and that US courts provided little by way of meaningful oversight.

"Providers, like Microsoft, regularly receive boilerplate secrecy orders unsupported by any meaningful legal or factual analysis," Burt told lawmakers. "Many of these orders should never have been approved by the courts."

Burt said that while the effort to target lawmakers and reporters disturbs many Americans, "what may be most shocking is just how routine court-mandated secrecy has become when law enforcement targets Americans' emails, text messages, and other sensitive data stored in the cloud."

© Thomson Reuters 2021


We discuss the return of PUBG Mobile, sorry, Battlegrounds Mobile India on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.
Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.

Flying Cars to Be Reality Soon? Watch Klein Vision's AirCar Take an Inter-City Test Flight
Motorola Edge 20 Series Launch Tipped to Take Place by July End
Share on Facebook Gadgets360 Twitter Share Tweet Snapchat Share Reddit Comment google-newsGoogle News
 
 

Advertisement

Follow Us

Advertisement

© Copyright Red Pixels Ventures Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
Trending Products »
Latest Tech News »