Google, Yahoo and Microsoft representatives on Tuesday implored the US government to help set ground rules for complying with demands by foreign law enforcement agencies for user records or censorship.
But a key question that remains after the U.S. Department of State concluded its inaugural global Internet freedom conference here is how to determine when such requests are “legitimate” and warrant compliance. That issue took center stage last year amid reports that Chinese authorities had succeeded in silencing–and in some cases imprisoning–cyberdissidents, thanks to cooperation from Yahoo and Microsoft.
“It’s not very simple when they just say, ‘Here’s the e-mail account, and we’re investigating under the following 17 organized crime and terrorism statutes,’” said Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel. “We can’t just go…snooping through e-mail accounts to figure out whether we like what they’ve been engaged in or not.”
Even under U.S. law, corporations aren’t expected to make moral judgments about the legitimacy of FBI or other authorities’ requests for information about their users, so they shouldn’t be expected to do the same on an international level, suggested Michael Samway, Yahoo’s deputy general counsel. “That’s why we need the government’s help,” he said.
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