In an expansive conversation about privacy and rebuilding trust in technology after revelations of widespread government spying, Smith talked about Microsoft’s first “sea-change” moment. It came in the year after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Microsoft, among other Internet companies and telcos, was asked to voluntarily share data with U.S. law enforcement.

In the heat of the moment, in 2002, “it was easy to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise do,” Smith told Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who moderated the event.

via Microsoft’s top legal gun decries privacy ‘arms race’ | Computerworld.