Dozens of allies on Friday threw their weight behind Microsoft Corp in a case that challenges law enforcement’s use of secrecy orders to cloak its pursuit of digital communications in investigations.
Amazon.com Inc, Google, Snapchat Inc, Salesforce.com Inc and several others filed a brief in support of Microsoft in its case against the US Department of Justice, while Apple Inc, Mozilla Corp and others made their own filing.
Civil liberties groups and media companies like Fox News, National Public Radio and the Washington Post submitted their own briefs.
Microsoft was also backed by a collection of law professors and a group of former US attorneys who worked in the Western district of Washington state, where Microsoft filed its federal lawsuit in April.
Microsoft’s effort to rally support is part of a growing resistance by technology companies to government attempts to snoop on the electronic communications of their customers.
Revelations by Edward Snowden, a former US government contractor, about the extent of electronic surveillance by spy agencies have rattled technology companies, which worry that trust in their products is being undermined.
Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said in a statement that the company was grateful for the support from what it expected to total 80 signatories on multiple briefs by the end of the day.
He noted the diversity of backgrounds of the signatories, saying: “It’s not every day that Fox News and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] are on the same side of an issue.”
“We believe the constitutional rights at stake in this case are of fundamental importance and people should know when the government accesses their e-mails unless secrecy is truly needed,” Smith added.
Microsoft’s lawsuit argued that the government’s use of a provision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 — which prevents it from notifying customers when their communications have been turned over to law enforcement, sometimes indefinitely — is unconstitutional.
The company said the secrecy orders violated the Fourth Amendment, which grants people and businesses the right to know if the government seizes or searches their property, along with the company’s First Amendment right to communicate with its customers.
Technology companies are concerned that secrecy orders are especially troubling in the era of cloud computing.
“In contrast to a search of a home or a seizure of physical property, there may be no way for a user to detect that the provider has disclosed information stored in the account to the government,” the brief filed by Amazon, Google and others said.
The Microsoft lawsuit does not center on any individual case, but instead is aimed at the legal process the government uses to keep its information requests secret.
The company said such secrecy orders are becoming more frequent.
In its lawsuit, Microsoft said of the more than 5,600 federal demands for customer data it received between September 2014 and March, about half were accompanied by secrecy orders that prevented Microsoft from telling affected customers that it had turned over their information to the government.
For the government data requests with secrecy orders that Microsoft received in the period it examined between 2014 and this year, more than 68 percent contained no fixed end date.
“Law enforcement officials have no practical need to keep their searches secret indefinitely, except in the rarest of circumstances, which must be supported by particularized need,” read the brief filed on Friday by former US attorneys supporting Microsoft.
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