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And I'll append an analysis which says that much more is needed because the new rule applies only to the Justice Dept, and the orders come from many places, including state and local governments:

https://www.justsecurity.org/46875/modernizing-ecpa-congress...

I'll add that a rule changed by the Justice Dept can be changed again. A law may be needed.

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Both good points. If I may ask, why is MS dropping the case if they had good points to make something come of it?

Likely because the government is a large enterprise customer who needs to not have a judicial precedent set.

I.E. This seems a lawfare move to step back general gag use, so that they can step forward again in specific gag use, rather than risk losing and finding future gags severely restricted. Microsoft is being polite because sometimes it might be reasonable for government to gag a subpoena, without it being a national security issue.

Microsoft sued the Justice Department. I'm not a lawyer, but since the Justice Department is no longer doing this thing, they may not have any standing for the lawsuit. I don't think they can force the lawsuit through to get a decision since they're no longer being harmed by it.

It wouldn't be the first time someone who thought they might lose backed down to avoid setting a precedent. Police departments did it with cases where people challenged the use of Stingrays, for example.

As a non-USian, is the Homeland Security (Newspeak!) under the Justice Dept, at least?

No, it's an independent, top-level cabinet position. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice are "peers", if you will.

I'm not sure it's entirely newspeak. If you look at the list of departments that were gathered together to form DHS [0], it does make some sense to have them all in the same organization.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...

The word "homeland" is propaganda-ish. Other department names are simply descriptive, such as Treasury, State, Interior, Veterans Affairs, etc. If named normally, it would have been something like 'Domestic Security'..

Personally I think the DoD should go back to it's original name, the department of war, and then homeland should take dod.

If we really want some Newspeak, how about the "Department of Peace"?

That's what Dennis Kucinich wanted to call it, though not so much in a newspeak way as just to reinforce a pacifist foreign policy.

No it's a Federal executive agency with a cabinet level Secretary reporting to the president. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_agencies_in_th...

DHS was made after 9-11 in 2001 by rolling a lot of other agencies together with a new overarching executive agency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...

> USian

Is this a statement thing?

I say it sometimes and I live here. Nothing wrong with it.

It's mostly a disambiguation thing, although it's definitely more popular in some circles than others. A similar term sometimes seen in more formal contexts is "US-American". "American" is sometimes construed to include all of North, Central, and South America, predominantly in Spanish and Portuguese languages (e.g. the Organization of American States / Organización de los Estados Americanos / Organización de los Estados Americanos), as opposed to modern English where the usual collective term is "the Americas".

Way too late, but it wasn't meant as any sort of value judgement.

It's just an anglified états-unien (and similar in many languages).

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