Tag: MLAT

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An Initial Assessment of CLOUD Agreements

The United States has bilateral CLOUD Act agreements with the United Kingdom and Australia, and Canada continues to also negotiate an agreement with the United States.1 CLOUD agreements are meant to alleviate some of the challenges attributed to the MLAT process, namely that MLATs can be ponderous with the result being that investigators have difficulties obtaining information from communication providers in a manner deemed timely.

Investigators must conform with their domestic legal requirements and, with CLOUD agreements in place, can serve orders directly on bilateral partners’ communications and electronic service providers. Orders cannot target the domestic residents of a targeted country (i.e., the UK government could not target a US resident or person, and vice versa). Demands also cannot interfere with fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech. 2

A recent report from Lawfare unpacks the November 2024 report that was produced to explain how the UK and USA governments actually used the powers under their bilateral agreement. It showcases that, so far, the UK government has used this substantially to facilitate wiretap requests, with the UK issuing,

… 20,142 requests to U.S. service providers under the agreement. Over 99.8 percent of those (20,105) were issued under the Investigatory Powers Act, and were for the most part wiretap orders, and fewer than 0.2 percent were overseas production orders for stored communications data (37).

By way of contrast, the “United States made 63 requests to U.K. providers between Oct. 3, 2022, and Oct. 15, 2024. All but one request was for stored information.” Challenges in getting UK providers to respond to US CLOUD Act requests, and American complaints about this, may cause the UK government to “amend the data protection law to remove any doubt about the legality of honoring CLOUD Act requests.”

It will be interesting to further assess how CLOUD Acts operate, in practice, at a time when there is public analysis of how the USA-Australia agreement has been put into effect.

  1. In Canada, the Canadian Bar Association noted in November 2024 that new enabling legislation may be required, including reforms of privacy legislation to authorize providers’ disclosure of information to American investigators. ↩︎
  2. Debates continue about whether protections built into these agreements are sufficient. ↩︎
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Two Thoughts on China’s Draft Privacy Law

Alexa Lee, Samm Sacks, Rogier Creemers, Mingli Shi, and Graham Webster have collectively written a helpful summary of the new Chinese Data Privacy Law over at Stanford’s DigiChina.

There were a pair of features that most jump out to me.

First, that the proposed legislation will compel Chinese companies “to police the personal data practices across their platforms” as part of Article 57. As noted by the team at Stanford,

“the three responsibilities identified for big platform companies here resonate with the “gatekeeper” concept for online intermediaries in Europe, and a requirement for public social responsibility reports echoes the DMA/DSA mandate to provide access to platform data by academic researchers and others. The new groups could also be compared with Facebook’s nominally independent Oversight Board, which the company established to review content moderation decisions.”

I’ll be particularly curious to see the kinds of transparency reporting that emerges out of these companies. I doubt the reports will parallel those in the West, which tend to focus on the processes and number of disclosures from private companies to government and, instead, the Chinese companies’ reports will focus on how companies are being ‘socially responsible’ with how they collect, process, and disclose data to other Chinese businesses. Still, if we see this more consumer-focused approach it will demonstrate yet another transparency report tradition that will be useful to assess in academic and public policy writing.

Second, the Stanford team notes that,

“new drafts of both the PIPL and the DSL added language toughening requirements for Chinese government approval before data holders in China cooperate with foreign judicial or law enforcement requests for data, making failure to gain permission a clear violation punishable by financial penalties up to 1 million RMB.”

While not surprising, this kind of restriction will continue to raise data sovereignty borders around personal information held in China. The effect? Western states will still need to push for Mutual Legal Assistant Treaty (MLAT) reform to successfully extract information from Chinese companies (and, perhaps in all likelihood, fail to conclude these reforms).1

It’s perhaps noteworthy that while China is moving to build up walls there is a simultaneous attempt by the Council of Europe to address issues of law enforcement access to information held by cloud providers (amongst other things). The United States passed the CLOUD Act in 2018 to begin to try and alleviate the issue of states gaining access to information held by cloud providers operating in foreign jurisdictions (though did not address human rights concerns which were mitigated through traditional MLAT processes). Based on the proposed Chinese law, it’s unlikely that the CLOUD Act will gain substantial traction with the Chinese government, though admittedly this wasn’t the aim of the CLOUD Act or an expected outcome of its passage.

Nevertheless, as competing legal frameworks are established that place the West on one side, and China and Russia on the other, the effect will be further entrenching the legal cultures of the Internet between different economic and political (and security) regimes. At the same time, data will be easily stored anywhere in the world including out of reach of relevant law enforcement agencies by criminal actors that routinely behave with technical and legal savvy.

Ultimately, the raising of regional and national digital borders is a topic to watch, both to keep an eye on what the forthcoming legal regimes will look like and, also, to assess the extents to which we see languages of ‘strong sovereignty’ or nationalism creep functionally into legislation around the world.

  1. For more on MLAT reform, see these pieces from Lawfare ↩︎
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The Little-Known Loophole Obscuring Facebook and Google’s Transparency Reports

The Little-Known Loophole Obscuring Facebook and Google’s Transparency Reports:

The number of user data requests to Internet giants from foreign governments, are being lost in a legal loophole.

For some time I’ve been asking corporate executives how they do, or don’t, account for legal requests served by Canadian authorities on American social networking companies. And the obscurity has been noted in work I’ve previously published on this topic. In an admittedly selfish way, it’s terrific to see a Canadian reporter look into this issue further only to learn that the transparency numbers provided by Google et. al. do not fully account for non-US authorities’ requests for data.

Hopefully we’ll see other journalists, in countries the US has Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) with, file similar requests to better break down how many requests their domestic law enforcement agencies are issuing to the American companies responsible for storing and transiting so much of our personal data. While Google and other companies should be congratulated for their work it’s apparent that corporate transparency isn’t enough: we need better government accountability and corporate transparency to properly understand how, why, and how often authorities request (and receive) access to privately held telecommunications data.