Microsoft Top Lawyer On Company’s Privacy Battles

After a federal appeals court handed Microsoft a major win last week in a case concerning a U.S. government warrant for data stored on computer servers overseas, the company’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith spoke with the Washington Post about its legal strategy to protect customer privacy. Smith said the battle over emails stored overseas in Ireland has implications for the company’s foreign customers, who “not only care about their privacy rights, but they also want their privacy rights to be protected by their own privacy laws.” Smith also discussed the company’s successful battle to publish information on how many U.S. national security letters and orders it received, and how many user accounts were affected. After winning that battle, Microsoft returned again to argue that many of the search warrants issued by the government impose gag orders with no time limit. “We concluded that these violate both Microsoft’s First Amendment rights and customers’ Fourth Amendment rights,” Smith said.