The following is a post from John Frank, Vice President & Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft. It was originally published on Microsoft on the Issues.
On Monday, we amended our petition to the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). This is an amendment to the motion we filed on June 19.
Since then, working with others in the industry, we’ve been pursuing a variety of options to provide additional transparency about any legal demands we may receive pursuant to U.S. national security authorities. In the context of our FISC litigation, we have spent the last several weeks trying to reach an agreement with the government in an effort to accomplish our ultimate goal more quickly, but, as we highlighted recently, those discussions ended in failure.
Our amended motion makes clear that we believe we should be able to provide detailed information on the volume of requests we receive from the U.S. government, and the nature and scope of their impact on Microsoft’s customers.
These are really important issues, and we’re pleased that both Yahoo and Facebook have also filed suit this morning, joining the earlier efforts from Microsoft and Google.
As we’ve said before, we believe we have a constitutional right to share this information, and we’ll continue to make that case before the court.