Microsoft and the CLOUD Act (passed March, 2018)

(graphic from giphy.com)

To start, why should you care?  Do you value the Bill of Rights?  The Constitution?  Let’s just throw all that away.

This is what I”m talking about.  It’s real, on stage, front and center and the laws Microsoft lobbied were passed by Trump without a second glance.

In a nutshell, Microsoft’s new Open Data initiative isn’t about our security, privacy, user control over our data in the world… nothing to do with that at all.  It’s the exact opposite of the EU’s GDPR as it allows transmission of data of any kind (your phone records, chat records, GPS coordinates… oh yeah, and the ol’ shopping profile but that’s a given now) to whomever asks for it.

I quote:

We bring all these advanced threat protection services to help you with trust and security. (He’s not talking to you and me, he’s talking to other business owners)

We have partnerships with the rest of the tech industry through something called the Intelligent Security Graph…(This is an Application-Programmer Interface that allows for data and intelligence integration through secure channels – backchannels between businesses about people that the public  will never see.)

[We have] partnerships that go through even the legislative process, if you think about what Microsoft did which is to first move the courts, then to work with legislative process in the United States to bring about the CLOUD Act… and now what we’re trying to do which is about bilateral agreements… (it’s quite clear that the government of the people, for the people, is being run by businesses for businesses. This is a fact that all can see.)