Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: Microsoft advances on challenge to search warrant gag orders

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: Microsoft advances on challenge to search warrant gag orders by Selina MacLaren :

Communications service providers are constantly faced with demands to turn over their customer’s records to law enforcement. But Microsoft found that when it was served with these demands, they were all too often accompanied by gag orders with no ending date, forbidding them to talk about the demand or tell their customer that their records were involved. So the tech giant decided last year to sue the government over those gag orders in federal court in Seattle, and in February, it overcame the first hurdle by beating back the government’s effort to have that part of the case dismissed.

In its complaint, Microsoft challenged parts of a federal law—the Electronic Communications Privacy Act—that allow the government to issue those gag orders. Microsoft argued that the law is unconstitutional in two ways: it restrains Microsoft’s right to speak to its customers in violation of the First Amendment, and it permits the government to illegally search customers’ records in violation of the Fourth Amendment.