Posted by Pamela Passman Corporate Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs
Earlier today I attended the 2010 Voices of Courage Awards luncheon in New York hosted by the Women's Refugee Commission, an organization that advocates for laws, policies and programs to improve the lives and protect the rights of refugee and displaced women and young people.
The Women’s Refugee Commission emerged a decade ago as a leading advocate for protection of women and unaccompanied children in the United States. The Commission identified the need for legal representation for the thousands of children who were appearing in U.S. immigration court without a lawyer, despite the formal proceedings and the sometimes life-and-death consequences of the judge’s ruling. The Commission has also undertaken incredible work developing and identifying economic opportunities for refugee women and children. We share a common belief that providing sustained social and economic opportunities for underserved populations, especially young people, is key to building thriving communities and a better world.
During the event a number of incredible stories of how people and organizations are working to address the refugee issue were showcased.
Among those recognized was Amalia Guzmán Molina, who is originally from El Salvador and founded Families of the Incarcerated, which works with the families of those who have been detained by immigration services in the United States. Also honored was Deogratias Niyizonkiza, who was born in Burundi and spent time in the United States before setting up Village Health Works, a non-profit organization providing free health care in Burundi to more than 28,000 patients, many of them refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania.
Posted by Tim Cranton Associate General Counsel, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit Today the FBI announced federal indictments returned against three culprits charged with disseminating a major malware scheme believed to have caused $100 million in losses to victims worldwide. The scheme revolved around a form of malware called “scareware,” which falsely persuades consumers that they need to purchase useless and expensive software to protect their computers. Microsoft is proud to have supported the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice in these cases, which send a clear and important message to cyber-criminals that they will be caught and brought to justice. The scheme in these indictments was global, complex and sophisticated. The scareware went by various names, including WinFixer – meant to mislead consumers into associating the bogus software with trusted Microsoft products. At one time, WinFixer and its variants are thought to have been responsible for 75 percent of scareware worldwide.
With the addition of Louisiana and Ohio today, 32 states and the District of Columbia have now joined Elevate America, an initiative we launched 15 months ago to provide people across the United States with access to no-cost technology training and certification that helps them find employment. So far, we’ve offered more than 800,000 free training and certification vouchers through our partnerships with Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
We’ve learned a lot from working with these states. They’re each facing complex economic challenges, but it’s very encouraging to see how hard they’re working to reduce unemployment. Elevate America is designed to help by strengthening workforce skills, specifically the computer skills that half of today’s jobs require, and that will be required by an estimated 77 percent of new jobs created in the next decade. Of course, computer skills are just one set of skills that people need to find employment, yet we’re already seeing firsthand how important access to these skills can be.
Posted by Brad Smith Senior Vice President and General Counsel
Over the past few months, starting with my January speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., I’ve talked a lot about the great potential for cloud computing to increase the efficiency and productivity of governments, businesses and individual consumers. To realize those benefits, we need to establish regulatory and industry protections that give computer users confidence in the privacy and security of cloud data.
Today, I returned to Washington to continue the discussion as one of the plenary speakers at the Gov 2.0 Expo 2010.
As I shared during my presentation, we are constantly seeing powerful new evidence of the value of cloud computing.
Today, for example, we announced that the University of Arizona chose Microsoft’s cloud platform to facilitate communications and collaboration among the school’s 18,000 faculty and staff. After initially looking at various supposedly “free” online services, the institution selected Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite to update its aging e-mail system and to provide new calendaring and collaboration tools. U. of A. officials concluded that, as a research university that conducts $530 million in research annually, it needed the enterprise-level security and privacy protections that BPOS could provide, but which the alternative services could not match.
Posted by Annmarie Levins Associate General Counsel
Today I am testifying before a House Judiciary Subcommittee that is contemplating reforms to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), an important but increasingly outdated law passed by Congress in 1986. Microsoft is part of a broad coalition that supports modernization of the legislation. ECPA regulates whether and how law enforcement can compel third-party telecommunications and Internet service providers to disclose user account information and customers’ stored communications. ECPA was originally designed to strike a balance between the legitimate needs of law enforcement, the burdens on service providers in responding to government demands for data and the public’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
In the nearly quarter-century since ECPA became law, the balance has shifted between the rights of users and law enforcement. Technological advancements—rather than decisions by Congress—have put more of our sensitive personal information within the reach of law enforcement.
As our General Counsel Brad Smith stated in his speech at the Brookings Institution in January, Microsoft believes that now is a critical time to address these issues. We are on the cusp of a potentially transformative age in Internet-based “cloud computing.” Cloud computing services have the potential to increase efficiencies for businesses and government, lower IT costs, create energy savings and spur innovative job-creating enterprises. They can enable small and medium-sized businesses, individual entrepreneurs and other innovators to tap into computing resources that previously had been available only to the largest companies. These capabilities can help drive innovation, make American businesses more competitive and ultimately contribute to economic growth.
But unless we are able to preserve and protect users’ privacy, the potential of cloud computing will not be fulfilled. This is one reason Microsoft has joined a broad coalition of advocacy groups, technology companies, and academics in the launch of the Digital Due Process Coalition. This Coalition is focused on updating ECPA to account for the profound changes in technology over the last two decades and to ensure that users’ legitimate expectations of privacy are respected while also fulfilling the needs of law enforcement.