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Microsoft is 100% correct and that is also why governments should dump them for Foss.
Or invest in local infrastructure.
And, not or.
Time to revive those Corel word perfect licenses.
Wish I could upvote this more than once!
I've been trying to convince my small rural municipality. I think everyone should.
This is the way!
It appears that it does not matter if the target is an individual, organization, or government. As long as the legal request is considered valid in the United States, the target or location of the data does not matter.
As an example, the Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces make significant use of Microsoft 365. They have their own defence-tailored instance called Defence 365, which serves as a common cloud infrastructure for collaboration across DND/CAF, with stakeholders and other government departments.
In theory, any data on or using Microsoft or a U.S.-based organization’s products and infrastructure which is not isolated from the Internet could be subpoenaed by the United States government.
We are so fucked if they decide to push..
The data is encrypted, hopefully really hard with some safe guards like a canary, so we should be safe if they decided today to try and crack it but I see your point. If that canary is killed we need a system to move it to.
Honestly I'd like to believe that but I doubt it. This would only be believable if MS's apps supported E2E encryption and they don't. Any encryption likely refers to in-transit and at-rest data. Which means the server owner can read anything they like.
I strongly hope it is true as well, especially since we are paying for their military version office, but yeah I have my doubts.
I recall over a decade ago, when various instituions like banks and universities were considering cloud apps. Everyone was concerned of data falling into US hands under the PATRIOT Act and how that'd breach Canadian privacy laws. I worked fot a Big 5 bank then. The cloud pushers kept coming up with various schemes to circumvent Canadian law so they can stop supporting their Canadian datacenters. I'm sure they got there eventually.
I really wish the Canadian government would look at all of this and see that we need more protection. I do not remember where I saw this so take it with a grain of salt but it is my understanding that Canada is running a fibre line over the North Pole, like the trans Atlantic and Pacific lines, to get to Sweden to integrate Canadian financial institutions more with the EU. If this is true hopefully we can also get off of Microsoft things at the national level.
I had accidentally found out my ISP was using an exchange server for their email, Exchange was probably the best option for them because they are getting out of hosting email. So I looked at the Canadian web host I got to replace my Wordpress blog with and bit the bullet after I paid for the following month of Apple’s Hide my email service I gave myself the month to move all my hide my addresses to a pseudo random email address at my domain. Then I started cancelling emails going to my ISPs address and creating new address for services that I still use or may use in the future.
Highly recommend separate email addresses for everything and the use of a pihole, give the Google the big F you!
Mountie has an extra hand.
Fine them billions!
If thy don’t comply with law, it has to hurt.
Just another pretext for Donnie Poopypants to annex you guys.
Annexation over a single company's profits?
What is this the British East India Company?
Anything to distract from the
EPSTEIN FILES
Basically yes.
Microshaft is a donor to the orange man.
Even more terrifying, everything is cloud based and/or has intrusive server-based DRM. They effectively have a kill switch for all MS services used by the government and military.
F-35 kill switch anyone?
Scary to think that maybe MS is running a fighter jet, sure as hell hope not but who knows.
Every pro US legal argument of MSFT is a legal argument for every US based company.
So glad I've been self hosting for years. Email on a server in Canada at OVH. Everything else I self host from home and access through the same OVH server or direct WireGuard connection to my home network.
So if it’s US-based it’s ok, but if Chinese-based it’s not ok!? 🤔
Who made that claim?
Or are you just JAQing here?
None of it is actually okay.
It's difficult to know if a business you frequent uses Microsoft, but I suppose you can always ask.
But, as an individual you can choose to avoid MS. Linux is really good these days and Libre Office will do most of what you need. It may not be identical to the MS experience, but you do have a choice.
It's actually quite simple to determine who an organization uses for their mail and data. All you need to do is review a domains DNS records (using a tool like dnschecker.org) and look at the MX record.
For Microsoft/office365, you'll see some variation of "protection.outlook.com"/"exchange.domain.com". For google, you'll see a variation of " MX.google.com".
DNS records are public information. The two biggest players in the space are Microsoft and google, the majority of SMBs do not host their own mail servers.
It's not identical and there is a learning curve. That applies both to Linux and to LibreOffice. But that's a choice everyone has to make. Do you want convenience or do you want digital sovereignty? You can't have both. On the positive side, once you get over the initial hump Linux provides an altogether better user experience just on account of not being enshittified.
Yep it’s time to dump MS.
~Also 365 is lazy, what about leap years?~
And we're happy to cooperate by signing our own version of that into law since there's an underlying treaty behind this warrantless data sharing: https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/a-preliminary-analysis-of-bill-c-2/
I hope we can find a way to fulfill our treaty obligations with something that's not as terrible as the current one: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2025/06/lawful-access-on-steroids/
Canada is already part of 5 eyes, and war declared to destroy its economy has not caused Canada to rethink its membership. NATO states operate firmly under CIA control including full allegiance from every "legitimate" political party. EU parliament members are appointed with CIA approval. You can know this because even if US political leadership pursues peace with Russia, and aggresses memebers, US colonies are apoplectic over the possibility of peace or resisting further colonial oppression. CIA allegiance will save us from Trump is thinking. Meanwhile, black site torture centers in Libya, Lebanon, and Syria must have thought the same.
5 eyes is already integrated with internet tech giants. It is a means to provide CIA/NSA with complete information over all 5 nation citizens, and using the other 4 to loophole info about Americans.
I doubt you need to worry about MS employees accepting CIA information requests. The monster is already in the house, as per US law, that no company is allowed to admit cooperating with.