House Passes NDO Fairness Act to Reform Secret Surveillance in Cloud Data Access
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the bipartisan NDO Fairness Act (H.R.6048), a significant piece of legislation aimed at reforming how federal courts issue non-disclosure orders (NDOs) to technology providers. These NDOs currently prevent companies from informing their customers when law enforcement accesses their cloud-stored data, including emails, texts, and photos. The new act mandates that federal courts apply a rigorous standard when issuing such secrecy orders, addressing a long-standing disparity between physical and digital searches. Historically, law enforcement needed to meet strict standards for secret physical searches, but could obtain boilerplate secrecy orders for digital data under the 40-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), enacted before cloud technology existed. Microsoft has been a strong advocate for these reforms, challenging indefinite NDOs as unconstitutional in 2016 and pushing for legislative changes to ensure greater transparency and protect custome... 
