Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Customer Security and Trust, Tom Burt, warned the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, that government law enforcement now routinely demands secret access to the data stored in the cloud by American citizens, businesses and organizations of all sorts, more often than not using “boilerplate secrecy orders unsupported by any meaningful legal or factual analysis.”
Burt was testifying before a hearing on “Secrecy Orders and Prosecuting Leaks: Potential Legislative Responses to Deter Prosecutorial Abuse of Power,” chaired by Jerold Nadler. Nadler was concerned about “intrusive” DOJ investigation under President Trump’s administration of people leaking to the press, but Burt’s testimony made clear this is no partisan pattern.
“Before the cloud, law enforcement agents executed search warrants and subpoenas seeking someone’s personal correspondence and documents by serving them directly on the people or organizations they wished to search — in other words, the targets received notice,” he said in his written testimony.
Not so now. Many users moved their email, photos and other data to the cloud, expecting greater privacy, “but for citizens, businesses and organizations throughout America, this expectation of privacy is unknowingly misplaced,” Burt testified. “Their own government is secretly demanding users’ data, without their knowledge, from cloud service providers, exploiting a subsection of the 35-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act to prevent notification of the demand to users by the cloud service providers. By doing so, the government has transformed decades-old criminal investigative techniques into secret surveillance operations — all without rigorous review by courts. This lack of transparency inevitably leads to overuse and abuse...
“Traditionally, secrecy was the exception. In recent years, law enforcement has turned that exception on its head, developing a practice of reflexively asking to keep even routine investigations secret.”
