When Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to help the FBI get into a mass murderer’s iPhone last winter, he was hailed for his boldness in fighting the government on a matter of principle. In fact, Cook was borrowing from the playbook of a top executive at Apple’s dowdier rival Microsoft—a genial, sandy-haired man named Brad Smith.

Smith has taken the government to court four times in the past three years, each time accusing it of breaching the Constitution in its efforts to get its hands on Microsoft customers’ data. He believes computers and the Internet have weakened vital checks on government surveillance that have typically helped to assure personal privacy. Now Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, says he is waging a legal war on the government in an attempt to restore those checks. “We shouldn’t depart from the historic balance,” Smith says, speaking in his bland corner office on Microsoft’s quiet campus in Redmond, Washington.

…

The company’s victory certainly provides a valuable talking point next time an overseas Microsoft customer frets about U.S. law enforcement; Smith says corporate customers in Europe have followed the case closely since it began in 2014. But Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, warns that the precedent set may not be good for privacy or the Internet. She says it may encourage other countries to pass laws requiring tech companies keep data within their borders as a way to lock out U.S. authorities. Data localization laws—Russia and Brazil already have them—are seen as enabling local spy agencies and disrupting the international competition that makes the Internet what it is.

Read More