[fromanator]

This specific issue has been there for years, long before covid. So not sure why you're jumping on covid being the cause here. The erosion of civil liberties specific to covid are mostly temporary emergency powers, which again aren't even at play here.

Also this Microsoft press release has a lot more information in it than the Rueters article https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/06/30/the-nee... "We have reviewed the number of secrecy orders that federal law enforcement agencies have presented to us from 2016 to the present, a period that spans the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. We found that while the number has increased some, federal law enforcement has consistently presented us with 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders each year, or 7-10 per day, representing one-quarter to one-third of all the legal demands we received. These are just the demands that Microsoft, just one cloud service provider, received. "