"If companies are handing over customer data or access to their equipment when there is no legal authority, then those businesses may well have broken the law.
NSLs are a type of subpoena authority used to compel internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data, such as web browsing history, email addresses and subscriber information.
The dispute, related to the $1.75 billion sale in 1998 of MCI's Internet business to Cable and Wireless, concerned accusations that MCI had not delivered on promises to hand over customer information as part of the deal.
Instead, the deal resulted in a lawsuit, with Cable and Wireless eventually winning $200 million to settle a claim that MCI WorldCom had failed to hand over customer information as part of the deal.
Mobile phone operators are required by law to hand over customer data on a case-by-case basis where specific individuals are being targeted, but Dishfire is understood to have collected information on citizens indiscriminately, sharing data on customer location, border crossings, banking details and travel plans.
Airbnb later reached an agreement with the Attorney General to hand over customer data, sans any info that would ID the host.
In that case, Amazon and the ACLU argued that the First Amendment protected the company from having to hand over customer records to the North Carolina Department of Revenue.
Earlier this week, the FBI finally allowed Cloudflare and CREDO Mobile to identify themselves as recipients of national security letters, which allow the agency to secretly order tech companies to hand over customer data.
The two data centers will be based in Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main, with Microsoft stressing this "data trustee" model means it will not have any access to customer data without the consent of the trustee, and that it cannot therefore be compelled — "even by a third party" — to hand over customer data.
There is a case in New York — in which Apple is trying really hard not to hand over customer information even though it has the tools to do so — and there is the case in California, where it is fighting an order from the FBI to intentionally weaken the security of a device to allow its passcode to be cracked by brute force.
