Amazon, Google, Apple… Fox News join Microsoft in US gag orders fight
Eclectic bunch support MS battle against US government’s secret requests for user data.
Even Fox News has jumped in along with five former FBI and justice department officials and a bunch of companies and organizations have put their names to an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit Microsoft filed against the federal government over its controversial and continued use of gagging orders.
Microsoft's chief legal officer Brad Smith joked in a statement that "it’s not every day that Fox News and the ACLU are on the same side of an issue."
I can understand short-term gags in some situations for ongoing investigations, but the quantity of it done and duration – particularly for tech giant information – is highly disturbing.
Privacy invasions are nesscery at times – but those asking for them need to be absolutely acountable themselves, and that cant be done if they are allowed to hide it.
Well and that's the kicker isn't it… why would they not allow them to become public after a period of time? I agree they should be able to have a period of time to execute on why they needed the info in the first place. But why would we NEVER want that to come out? Perhaps because of the scope of requests/gags?
I think its scope as well as covering their own backs. They dont want their investigations to be investigated in case they get in trouble for it. Maybe embarrassing mistakes. Maybe over-profiling. Maybe just sheer laziness, "just checking" requests when there wasn't good cause for it. Could even be cases where requests were completely outside the scope of any investigation, and purely a abuse of power. We know from other snowden leaks this happened at the NSA – people checking up on ex-girlfriends and such.
Of course, that doesn't mean any of those are majority reasons. But when you got a black box how do you tell?
EXACTLY.