Microsoft: NSA should not be able to just request data outside the US

The US secret services, including the NSA, should not be able to request data hosted outside the United States without a request in a foreign court. That’s what Microsoft advocates.

According to Brad Smith, Microsoft’s head of legal affairs, the US government would not accept it if foreign governments simply requested data from US servers. “Why would it expect foreign governments to accept that?” Smith wonders.

The American government does, however, request data that is hosted on foreign servers with American court orders, partly on the basis of the Patriot Act. Foreign companies with interests in the United States are required to cooperate, even if data is requested from foreign nationals not hosted in the United States. According to Microsoft, in such cases, the US government should request data through foreign courts.

Microsoft also wants the US government to promise not to break into data centers and fiber optic cables, as the NSA would have done together with the British secret service at Google and Yahoo. In addition, the company from Redmond wants data to no longer be collected on a large scale, as was the case with telecom giant Verizon: all metadata was collected and stored by the NSA. In addition, transparency must be improved, according to Microsoft.