"Justice Department moves to end routine gag orders on tech firms"

By Ellen Nakashima

October 24 at 11:31 AM

The Justice Department has issued new guidelines aimed at providing more transparency around prosecutors’ secret demands for customer data stored on tech firms’ servers.

The binding guidance, approved last week by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, ends the routine imposition of gag orders barring companies from telling customers that their email or other records have been turned over in response to legal demands.

It also bans — in most cases — indefinite gag orders that forbid a company from ever telling users that their data have been searched.

The move comes a year and a half after Microsoft sued the department, asking a federal judge in Seattle to strike down portions of a major privacy law that govern the secrecy orders. The tech giant argued that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act violated customers’ Fourth Amendment right that a search be reasonable because it did not require the government to notify them when their records were obtained. The company also argued that the law’s gag-order provision violated the company’s First Amendment right to talk to its customers.

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Continua qui: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-moves-to-end-routine-gag-orders-on-tech-firms/2017/10/23/df8300bc-b848-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html