14 DAY TRIAL // Tech companies are joining forces to fight against the FBI's desire to get its hands on people's emails. Apple, Amazon, Cisco, and Microsoft have all filed an amicus brief in support of Google.
Silicon Valley giants have known for years how difficult it is to fight against the government, especially when it wants to get its hands on the data of your users. This time, they're working together to back Google who was ordered by a court to hand over emails in response to an FBI search warrant. In this particular situation, the court said it doesn't matter if Google has the emails stored on data centers that are not on the territory of the United States.
“When a warrant seeks email content from a foreign data center, that invasion of privacy occurs outside the United States - in the place where the customers’ private communications are stored, and where they are accessed, and copied for the benefit of law enforcement, without the customer’s consent,” reads the brief filed by the tech giants Apple, Amazon, Cisco, and Microsoft.
There's a flip side
They believe that granting access to the FBI only creates a precedent for other countries to demand emails sent and received by US citizens, stored on US soil, by using the same methods. This, of course, would be severely frowned upon by those very same courts that are now ordering Google to supply the FBI with data on its customers stored in foreign data centers.
“Our sister nations clearly view US warrants directing service providers to access, copy, and transmit to the United States data stored on servers located within their territory as an extraterritorial act on the part of the US government,” the file further reads.
Google has previously said that it would battle against the court order and it seems that it has decided to bring in backup. In a similar situation, the court sided with Microsoft, which is probably part of the reason the company decided to join in on the matter. There's also the fact that all these companies face the same difficulties when fighting against the government's overreach and that such a decision could be used as precedent in cases against themselves.