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I asked these questions on a previous thread but didn't get any answers. I'm seriously interested in actual responses (i.e. these aren't rhetorical). ----- If

• rayiner 12y ago
  The legal status of something like AWS is up in the air. On one hand, you have what the law has been to date: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third-party_records_doctrine_be_revisited http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question... ("In essence, the doctrine holds that information lawfully held by many third parties is treated differently from information held by the suspect himself. It can be obtained by subpoenaing the third party, by securing the third party’s consent or by any other means of legal discovery; the suspect has no role in the matter, and no search warrant is required.") On the other hand, you have the recent decision in California v. Riley: "The United States concedes that the search incident to arrest exception may not be stretched to cover a search of files accessed remotely—that is, a search of files stored in the cloud. See Brief for United States in No. 13–212, at 43–44. Such a search would be like finding a key in a suspect’s pocket and arguing that it allowed law enforce- ment to unlock and search a house." Slip. Op. at 21. It's difficult to reconcile the Third Party doctrine with Riley. Under the third party doctrine, storing a document in the cloud is like leaving a box of papers in your friend's garage--not protected under the 4th amendment. But under Riley, storing a document in the cloud is like storing it locally on your phone--protected under the 4th amendment. How the two will be reconciled is something that has yet to shake out. Note that Microsoft has already decided to appeal this: “We will appeal promptly and continue to advocate that people’s e-mail deserves strong privacy protection in the U.S. and around the world.” What the Second Circuit ultimately says on this case will go towards figuring out how this will shake out.
  • jsmeaton 12y ago
    > It's difficult to reconcile the Third Party doctrine with Riley. Under the third party doctrine, storing a document in the cloud is like leaving a box of papers in your friend's garage--not protected under the 4th amendment. But under Riley, storing a document in the cloud is like storing it locally on your phone--protected under the 4th amendment. What about storing documents in a safety deposit box of a bank? Where does that fall legally? I would imagine that storing documents on a box rented from a cloud provider should fall under the same law.
    • rayiner 12y ago
      You do have a 4th amendment interest in the contents of safety deposit boxes, storage units, and rented apartments. So the question becomes: is the cloud more like your friend's garage, or a safety deposit box in a bank? I think the relevant distinction is that when it comes to a safety deposit box, or a storage unit, or an apartment, the landlord no longer has unrestricted access to the unit, and indeed it can be illegal for him to access the unit without your permission. Thus the expectation of privacy is higher than with your friend's garage, which he can continue to access whenever he wants without restriction. So it might well be that there is a stronger privacy interest in something like AWS, where Amazon doesn't look into your instances, than in other cloud services that look at the data you store in them. That said, as I said, Riley makes me think that the Supreme Court is just going to give blanket 4th amendment protection to cloud services, regardless of the fact that some are, in actual fact, much more private than others.
      • jsmeaton 12y ago
        Thanks, appreciate the information. I was thinking more along the lines of an EC2 instance rather than a shared service like Gmail.
  • pattisapu 12y ago
    Riley doesn't apply here. Riley dealt with the search incident to arrest exception to the warrant requirement under the Fourth Amendment. In this Microsoft case, law enforcement had a warrant.