The 1st Cloud Computing Search Warrant: Google Docs Under Investigation
Posted by Bo Cramer on Thu, May 27, 2010 @ 10:37 AM
Spam Marketer Issued Search Warrant by FBI
The Social Media Law blog by @SardarLawFirm recently brought up a very interesting point regarding a warrant on Google by the FBI: this appears to be the first of such warrants seeking information residing in "the cloud."
The article went on to say that Wired recently reported the findings of a search warrant carried out by the FBI for a company called Pulse Marketing. The company had sent millions of spam messages promoting acai berry, and had a system that utilized multiple Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts. Prosecutors are determining whether Pulse Marketing is in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1037, a regulation that applies to the use of fake domains and email addresses to send quantities of unsolicited commercial email.
While the terms of the warrant are interesting, more unique is how "the cloud" plays a roll in all this. The documents in question were stored in the cloud-based document sharing application, Google Docs. This will undoubtedly bring up questions about cloud security. For example, is your company documents safe in this new era of message regulation? However, email accounts have been searched and scrutinized for years for inappropriate usage, the general consensus seems to be that businesses and consumers are perfectly fine with the current state of email. That being the case, will one cloud search warrant cause a massive upheaval in cloud dissent? Doubtful. If anything, this is good news for cloud computing. Shared apps and social media are being treated with the same standards as regular email does. In fact, companies that specialize in email archiving for compliance are now beginning to offer social media and IM archiving for the same reasons. Could this incident be an indicator for a cloud shift in IT? I say no, but let's wait and see...
Article by @bocramer & @aleckphillips
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