WASHINGTON: According to media attorneys and lawmakers, the United States needs to provide the same legal safeguards to user data stored on internet companies’ servers as it does to physical files maintained in home file cabinets. The witnesses testified during a hearing to determine whether the US government abuses its secret subpoena power to hurt internet users in the United States. The hearing comes after it was revealed that former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department covertly sought the phone records of reporters and Democratic members in order to investigate classified material leaks.
The news of the DOJ’s investigations infuriated lawmakers, prompting renewed calls to end the federal government’s practice of secretly subpoenaing cloud service providers – such as Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc, and Alphabet Inc’s Google – to gain access to their users’ emails, documents, and instant messages without giving them a chance to defend their rights.
The method, according to California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, is “an end run around the rights that the Fourth Amendment is designed to offer to all Americans.”
“The same safeguards must apply whether the information is sought in an office file or on a cloud server across the country or across the world,” Eve Burton, the chief legal officer of Hearst Corporation, told the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee.
Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle reacted positively to the call.
Representative Tom McClintock, a California Republican, claimed the spying was “in flagrant violation of its most fundamental statute” in the US.
Microsoft executive Tom Burt, the only IT industry speaker at the hearing, claimed his company had received 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders per year in the last five years and that US courts provided no real oversight.
“Boilerplate confidentiality orders, such as those issued by Microsoft, are routinely issued without any substantial legal or factual examination,” Burt told legislators. “The courts should never have authorized many of these decrees.” “What may be most alarming is precisely how routine court-mandated secrecy has become when law enforcement targets Americans’ emails, text messages, and other sensitive data kept in the cloud,” Burt said, “while the effort to target politicians and media concerns many Americans.” (Raphael Satter contributed reporting from Washington; Stephen Nellis contributed additional reporting from San Francisco; Grant McCool and Matthew Lewis edited the piece.)/nRead More