Microsoft: Future Bleak with Unlawful Data Collection

"Microsoft's top lawyer continued his months-long public campaign to pressure the United States government to reform the secret data collection practices revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013," reports CNET.

Speaking Tuesday morning at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, the company's general counsel, Brad Smith, called on Congress and the White House to stop what he described as "the unfettered collection of bulk data" by the government and argued for the reform of the secret FISA court.

"I want law enforcement to do its job in an effective way pursuant to the rule of law," he said. "If we can't get to that world, then law enforcement is going to have a bleak future anyway." ...

"By the end of this decade there will be 50 billon devices connected to the Internet of Things around the world," Smith said. "This issue is going to become more important, not less."

In his Brookings appearance, Smith said the technology industry was "fundamentally united" in opposition to the government policies that Snowden's disclosures revealed about the extent of the National Security Agency's cyberspying operations. Beyond the obvious questions about privacy and civil liberties, he also suggested there was a business urgency to fixing the problem sooner rather than later.

"We are in a business that relies on people's trust," he said. "We're offering a world where you should feel comfortable about storing (your information) in the cloud...You need to have confidence that this information is still yours."

Where might all this be heading? One idea Smith broached was a dashboard where people can see what data exists about them, how it's getting used, as well as "some way for people technologically to have control." It's unclear whether Microsoft is already working on such a product...